|
mp3 lo-down
+ for eval purposes only + (meaning: buy the records!) + all mp3s up for limited time + removed if owner requests + no direct linking please + mind the bandwidth + cells off during the film + do not place in microwave + enjoy
* = fave blog, checkitout
mp3s: oonst oonst oonst
+ 12 am maternal + 24 hours* + adoru + bigstereo + blk:mrkt* + banana nutrament* + dilated choonz + distortion disco + electro-lights + fat planet* + fluokids* + headphonesex* + modyfier* + polloxniner + the prettiest pony + SOAP + TAPE*
mp3s: indypoprawks
+ the big ticket* + the catbirdseat* + gorilla vs bear + grapejuice plus + green pea-ness* + i am fuel, you are friends + i guess i'm floating + largehearted boy + music (for robots)* + myself myself + the rich girls r weeping* + the runout groove + said the gramaphone* + scissorkick + sixeyes + songs: illinois + dance, indie kids, dance! + the witness exchange + the yellow stereo* + you ain't no picasso + yr dirty boots*
mp3s: soul, beats & slang
+ captain's crate + cocaine blunts* + dirty shadows project + ear fuzz* + grimetime + nation of thizzlam* + the #1 songs in heaven + razorblade runner + so many shrimp* + soul sides* + steady bootleggin' + yay mecca
mp3s: supereclectic
+ 33/45 + aurgasm* + best foot forward + comboplates* + comfort music + cotton candy hammer + fluxblog* + just for a day + moistworks* + pound for pound + the of mirror eye + spread the good word + stypod* + the tofu hut* + tuwa's shanty* + twenty jazzfunk greats* + the white noise revisited
mp3s: the specialists
+ benn loxo du tàccu* + the bubblegum machine! + copy, right?* + ♥ where u been so long? + locust st.
re: music, culture, the grand design
+ S/FJ + kid kameleon + michelangelo matos + phillip sherburne + blissout (simon reynolds) + gutterbreakz + deeptime + blackdown soundboy + house is a feeling + riddim method + the original soundtrack + the tinyluckygenius + franklin bruno + zoilius (carl wilson) + last plane to jakarta + largehearted boy + lacunae (douglas wolk) + nick catchdubs + beer and rap + clap clap + poptext + riff central + dissensus + dolby surrender + so this is love
music resources
+ all music guide + 75 or less + pitchfork + aquarius records + stylus + neumu + africanhiphop.com + dusted + get yr bootleg on + metacritic music + anti hit list (current) + anti hit list (eye archive) + soulstrut + jahsonic + dusty groove + ILM
politics shmolitics
+ memeorandum + the huffington post + think progress + atrios + glenn greenwald + talking points memo + firedoglake + talk left + crooks and liars + myDD + pandagon + digby + tbogg + james wolcott + matthew yglesias + political animal + orcinus + informed comment + fafblog! + jesus' general + the poor man + the rude pundit + altercation + bloggermann + operation yella ellephant + lefty blog catalog + the moderate voice + andrew sullivan + baloon juice + the belgravia dispatch
constant clicks
+ the comics curmudgeon + found + wooster collective + design observer + bookslut + 43 folders blog & wikki + today in alternate history + swinneydotorg + citynoises ♥
| Thu 26 October 2006
we're all just animals looking for a home  Loefah "System" - Direct from underground London, here's dubstep legend Loefah with a track that will shiver your timbers and rattle your chains, chock full of halfstep riddim, electro shock, and destructive beat. What I love most: About two minutes in, right around the time the synthetic bird tweeter sounds fly out of the speakers, this terrific booming bass tone that sounds inexplicably louder than anything else on the track kicks in on a regular rhythm. I first heard it on my car stereo, and I swear I wouldn't've been surprised if it's doors had just blown off at that moment. The sound kind of reminds me of the crazy, ginormously ominous blimp from Blade Runner--that hovering behemoth that seems to follow Rick Deckard around the Los Angeles of 2019, endlessly and breathlessly announcing that a new life awaits YOU in the off-world colonies!! Each one of its PA messages is heralded with a similar blast. (Perhaps this hits at the core of my interest in dubstep, as I'm a huge fan of that film, and most of the best dubstep tracks sound as if they were composed from the vantage point of a dystopian Blade Runner-esque future and shuttled back to the present via a secret wormhole in the basement studio of a pirate radio station somewhere in Croydon.*) "System" is one of several headslamming dubstep joints to be found on Tectonic Plates, an upcoming 2xCD compilation that does double-duty as a tidy overview of the Bristol-based Tectonic label**, and as a useful primer for open-minded listeners who are curious about the dubstep sound but haven't yet managed to really plug into the sound in any meaningful way. For those of you who feel totally left out of the loop, it might help to think of dubstep as a somewhat natural evolution from dub-influenced and UK-based outfits such as Portishead, Massive Attack, Tricky, Roni Size, and such...it's got that same midnight-driven, deep-bass-influenced hard pop to the chops as the best tracks by those artists, but it progresses in a much more minimal direction.*** The collection also includes tracks by DJ Distance, Digital Mystikz, Skream, DQ1, Vex'd, DJ Pinch, and several other notable dubstep hard-hitters. [Tectonic Plates ships in the UK in early November; pre-order it at Boomkat. But if you only want Loefah's "System" on vinyl, Boomkat's got it now.] Infadels "Girl That Speaks No Words (Alan Braxe and Fred Falke Remix)" - So there's this new musical genre identifier making the rounds, and apparently (depending upon who you ask) these here Infadels people are a part of it: "New Rave." Yikes, right? You've gotta wonder what the product marketers and UK music journalists (some would argue they're the same thing) were smoking when they came up with that one. But there it is, and so we've gotta deal with it. Well I've had the pleasure of listening to a lot of these "New Rave" bands--right now, Klaxons, the band for whom this term was apparently invented, is an unavoidable cause celebre among the mp3 blog zone of the internets (as of this writing)--and near as I can tell, "new rave" is basically shorthand for "dance-punk band that isn't from NYC or produced by DFA." Feel free to let me know if I'm wrong on this account. I may be missing an important distinction here. I might be aesthetically crippled. (And yeah, I know "dance-punk" is also fairly excerable, but at least it doesn't summon the image of neo-hippies spin-dancing with glowsticks to my mind's eye. If people didn't give into the useless need to trash and reinvent musical genres every couple months, we wouldn't have to put up with this BS.) Anyway, the original version of "Girl Who Speaks No Words" just broke into the BBC Indie Rock Charts at No. 4, and I think that's just great, because if Infadels do well it could mean more singles from them, which in turn would mean more cool remixes of those singles, and so far that's what I like best about Infadels. The remixes, I mean. They're fun. Someday I might get around to listening to "The Girl Who Speaks No Words" as Infadels created it, but for now I'm more than happy with this Braxe/Falke retouch, which paints the song with a gauzy Sunday afternoon gloss that blurs it to an abstraction of melody and then layers nice crunchy bass-heavy electrohouse synths on top so we can groove righteously to it and gradually forget that terms like "new rave" ever existed. Mmmm. Tasty nummers. [Buy it at Juno!] Kissogram "My Friend Is A Seahorse (Radio Slave Remix)" - This expansive and picturesque minimal house treatment by Radio Slave just seems to get better and better each time I give it a spin. I won't say it's the Arc de Triumph of minimal techno tracks or anything, but it does take you on a lovely journey over the hills and through the dells with a few moments of fuzzy distorted turbulence just for drama's sake. Just as it ends, a sexy female voice utters a few scraps of spoken-word lyrics in what I'm assuming is German (update:I'm told it's def. not German. could be some Scandanavian language, or perhaps German spun backwards...). Says something about these Berlin-music-focused times maybe that I'm responding more to female vox in German than, say, French or Italian...but that's perhaps a topic best left unexamined for now. You can find the original track on Kissogram's 2004 LP The Secret Life Of Captain Ferber, if you can find it; meanwhile this remix is part of a debut 12" by defDrive records. [Buy it at Phonica!] Beatconductor "Let The Music Play (edit)" - I feel like I've waxed rhapsodic about the Swedish mashup producer Beatconductor**** over and over in this space, so much so that I can't help but imagine that anyone reading this must be thinking What? Beatconductor again? C'mon, Moe, get over it! But the truth is that I've actually posted tracks by Ture Sjöberg's alternate aliases, such as Beatfanatic and Southside Break Crew. It's true that this guy's work is an old standby of mine by now, but sometimes you just gotta post what you gotta post. This is a track from Beatconductor's LP A Collection of Reworks. It came out in the early spring of this year or thereabouts, but as far as I can tell it's received little if any love from the audioblog scene. And that's kinda criminal if you ask me. So here's a magic carpet track to glide you into the weekend with a grin, if you please: an elegant, swellegant jumbo-size edit of Lionel Richie's "All Night Long (All Night)" that even your mom and dad will love. I can see the midnight stars over the outside garden dancefloor a'sparklin' already, and the golden glasses of sparkling champagne are all lined up on the bar, waiting for takers. Yeah, JUMBO JUMBO! [Buy it from Turntable Lab (US) or Phonica (UK)!] *Evidence supporting this theory: the name of the debut LP from Kode9 + the Spaceape. I mean, c'mon, people, what more do you need? **which, it must not be left out, is run by the terrifically talented DJ Pinch, a producer, label-boss, and scene organizer (if you're lucky enough to be in Bristol when one of his Subloaded parties are on offer, it would be a tragic mistake to miss it) who also happens to've created some of the toughest tracks on the dubstep block thus far. Tectonic is considered to be one of the groundbreaking labels in dubstep, alongside DMZ, Tempa, and Hyperdub. ***Of course, others will say that description of the genre is too simplistic or totally off base, and, well, sure, there's a lot more to it. But if you want people to make a connection to the sound, sometimes you need to draw them a map. ****As opposed to the alter-ego of L.A.-based hip-hop producer Madlib, just to make sure everyone's clear.... I know it's been a bit since my last post, but trust me, I'm still hangin' in there. Thanks for sticking around. The next post or two should have some musical treats based on the subjects of my columns for Alarm magazine, so stay tuned! gimme a holla | 19 hollas heard Thu 28 September 2006
gimme a break!  The Hole In The Wall Gang "Breakology" - Breaks, breaks, breaks! More of them than you can throw a stick at! Coming at you like a swarm of breakdancing birds, bees, and robot drone warplanes! OMG. This one's got 'em all pretty much: the funky drummer, the Beastie Boys, the Led Zeppelin, the whole Run DMC vs Aerosmith thing, a funny slice of dread rasta, some sort of gypsy music clusterbomb, def breaks, nostalgic breaks, yo mama is so fat breaks, all kinds of crazy-ass-mofo breaks, and more. Let's just put it like this: If you could eat breaks like food, this track would exceed your average daily allowance by about a week. Drop the needle on this during your next houseparty, and you'll have to pay insane bills for the foundation repair later--but at the time you'll be dancin' too hard to care. It's all courtesy of a shady set of UK-based blendmasters who have dubbed themselves The Hole In The Wall Gang. If you know who they are, please give them my props. [Buy the Scissor Cuts Vol. 1 12"at Phonica, ya heard?] Monareta "Matanza Funk" - Got this cheerful groover off of the soundtrack to La Mujer de Mi Hermano ("My Brother's Wife"): a steamy silver-screen-sized telenovela of mostly South American extraction* that I must've missed when it made its run across the indie moviehouses in my area. Apparently I didn't miss much; this tale of a woman who leaps outside the boundaries of her boring marriage by having an incestuous affair with her bro-in-law was panned pretty much universally across the U.S. as being pretty to look at, but shallower than a kiddie pool. You pretty much get all you need to know from the "parental advisory" that the New York Times tacked onto the end of their review of the film: "It has picturesque sex, titillating language, and excessive use of lip gloss." In other words, it's an episode of Desperate Housewives without the laughs. So, bad movie, ok, but a really entertaining soundtrack of Latin, Mexican, and South American artists, most of whom I'd never heard of 'till now. It's got electronica (Nortec Collective, Intoxicados, Turista), dub (Mexican Institute of Sound), hip-hop (Kemo the Blaxican, Intoxicados), lush downtempo pop (Sara Valenzuela, Pinker Tones, Andrea Echiverri, Pachos), and even a rousing electro-tango cover of New Order's Blue Monday (by Tanghetto). I picked out "Matanza Funk" mainly because the robotic announcements that are peppered throughout it--most likely clips repurposed from educational English/Spanish language tapes--perfectly sum up the life of yr average hustlin' middle-class white-collar office worker, which I often seem to be when I'm not paying attention. My Spanish skills aren't up to deciphering the raps that make up the meat of the track, but I like how they sound and that's enough for me. Monareta is a two-man act out of Columbia (now based in NYC), and you can find this track and several others on their Internet-download-only debut album Electronoche. [Buy it at Musica360!] The Juan Maclean "Tito's Way (Lindstrom and Prins Thomas Remix)" - Meanwhile, here's a tall, smooth, and lovely remix of The Juan Maclean by the ever-dependable Lindstrom and Prins Thomas. It turned up over the summer on Visitations, an Internets-only release of remixes, so it may be old news to some, but I just got myself turned on to it recently, and am loving its long, languorous groove, complete with funhouse elastic guitar riffs and spacy synth washes. It's the sort of thing I would've expected to find all over the audioblogosphere, or at least the district of it that concerns itself with electronic music and remixes and such, especially given the popularity of the folks involved...but nope. Hopefully this isn't because horrible events befall the people who dare to post this track to their humble blogs. Probably now I'm going to have the brakes go out in my car the next time I go for a drive, or maybe a meteor will strike me as I walk down the street to my favorite coffeeshop. Oh well, at least if that happens, folks can say died in the service of getting good music out to the peoples. And this can go on my tombstone: Bleep boop boop bleep. Beep bloop bloop bloop. [Buy it at iTunes, Rhapsody, MusicNow, all the usual big-name online tune retailers.] Tony DeVivo "Percussion Suite (Osunlade Yoruba Peoples Remix)" - Finally, here's a heady blend of percussion, synth, and soulful African-esque glossolalia to sail you downriver towards your weekend bliss, whatever it may be (makes me want to crack open a beer and start weekending right now! but no, it's only Thursday as of this writing, sigh). It's part of Obliqsound Remixes Vol. 2, which, as one might justifiably expect, is full of remixes of tracks that originally were released via the Obliqsound label. For added fun, the Obliqsound people will be offering a Extra-Specially Exclusive Collector's Edition of this particular compilation that comes packaged in a funny sort of plastic "carrier bag design" that was created by famous industrial designer Karim Rashid and Brazilian footwear designer Melissa. It's only fifty bucks! A bargain for an aesthetically perfect industrial design object that will make all your stuck-up artsy ID-obssessed friends squeal and bring you untold joy for decades to come. Or maybe not, who am I kidding. Does anyone really buy these overpriced CD "collectors editions" anymore? Does anyone really buy CDs anymore? [Lucky for you, you don't have to make up your mind whether to just get the CD or the FABULOUS COLLECTOR'S EDITION just yet. The album's official release date is sometime next week. But when it comes out, you'd better act fast, or all those funny little plastic carrier cases (they're only making 2000 of them!!!!) will be ALL GONE. And then you'll be sad.] *The director's Peruvian, and the money that backed it came from the U.S., Mexico, Argentina, Peru, Chile, and Columbia. I think. I only bring it up because I've noticed that folks take offense if you try to state that it's specifically from [x] country. ( various random announcments! click to see! ) gimme a holla | 21 hollas heard Mon 18 September 2006
bang the pole and here it comes  Underworld "JAL to Tokyo (Paul Woolford Vocal Mix)" - Thought I'd kick things off with this remix of a track from Underworld's Riverrun Project--a download only series of Underworld releases that had its debut last November. All of the remixes are being released in 12" format throughout this month, and of the ones I've heard thus far, this remix of "JAL to Tokyo" by the celebrated British DJ/producer Paul Woolford takes the "Most Dynamic" prize in my opinion. Which may not be saying much, since Underworld's deal generally is to set up these deceptively simple grooves that seem rather unassuming on the surface but which gradually reveal hidden currents and surprising depth with each repetition (sounding). Woolford's mix is wonderfully muscular and relentless, with a central drum sound that makes me think of robots playing an endless game of handball. Layered over that, first chop 'n' diced and then somewhat straightforward are the ever-beguiling and always-entrancing abstract vocal calisthenics of Karl Hyde, without whom Underworld's rivers would most certainly run dry, at least for this devoted listener. [Buy it at Juno (UK).] Justus Köehnicke and Dirk Leyers feat Eric D. Clark "An Ounce of Memories (Vocal Version)" - It's taken me awhile to warm up to this relatively subtle collaboration between Köehnicke and Closer Musik's Leyers. To my beat-weary ears, on first listen a few days back this minimal techno joint with lovelyquiet soul vox (courtesy of the ever-talented Eric D. Clark) seemed just a bit bland for my tastes. But then I listened to it again this Monday morning, and the song snapped right into place. You know how it is. Some songs just lie in wait for exactly the right circumstances to leap into your heart: a particular shade of indian summer sunset, the lonely hush after a big fight with your lover, that long long nightitme drive back home after a long and eventful vacation weekend. If conditions aren't right when the track plays, you get bupkis...but when they're just so, ah, then you're in for a revelation of sorts. Now I'm not going to go so far as to say that I saw the coming of the glory or anything, but for me, "An Ounce of Memories" turned out to be just the thing to iron out a bit of my wrinkled mental laundry as my work week ground into gear once again. [This 12" is due out Sept. 25 or therabouts, and should be available at all of the usual venues including Boomkat (UK) and Forced Exposure (US) at that time.] R.D. Burman with Asha Boshle and Kishore Kumore "Aa Dekhen Jara (Edit)" - And now for something completely different. Everyone who's anyone knows that there's nothing better than the blend of the scintillating glamorama Bollywood sound with the rump-shaking, head-nodding rhythms of deep-fried '70s funk. Everyone knows this, it's almost a priori knowledge you're endowed with at birth. There's not a person in the world, for example, who, upon hearing their first blast of James Brown tearing into "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag," didn't immediately think "yeah, sure, that's great, but where's the filmi orchestral backup to make it complete?" or "wouldn't it have sounded 200% better if they'd pulled in Lata Mangeshkar to spice up the track with some nice Hindi background vocals?" This lack of musical connection was for years considered one of the great tragedies of modern popular music, as fans of both genres were left feeling a profound sense of existential loss that only the combination of those forms--funk and Bollywoodi would soothe. Luckily for fans of Bollywood, funk, and heck, the entire planet in general, a 12" series called Sitar Beat began plugging the collective hole in the hearts of music fans worldwide a couple years back. But they only offered a temporary balm, as the records were sold in limited quantities before once again falling out of print. But now we can all rejoice, as the entire series has been collected on one CD: Sitar Beat!: Indian-Style Heavy Funk Vol. 1. Praise hallelujah and hari krishna! This particular track, featuring the legendary Asha Boshle on vox and a booty-bumping arrangement by 70s Bollywood soundtrack wizard R.D. Burman, totally rocks the party with the tastiest funky guitar, drum, sitar, and tabla licks this side of the Ganges--and closes with a wonderfully wacky vocoder countdown that sends your feet shuffling right out the door and down the street. (My only complaint with this collection is that the majority of the tracks presented are edits, and often all-too-brief ones at that. It's hard to tell if they were cut down to size in order to isolate the funky parts of otherwise non-funky tracks, or rather just so they could squeeze a few extra "bonus beat" segments onto the CD. I realize the edits work out nicely for DJs, but they sort of blow the experience for everyone else.) [Get your funky sitar sounds at Turntable Lab (US) or Amazon (UK).] Jst★r "Unbreak My Dub" - And finally here's a nice blend from Jst★r, a London-based producer who has made his name in the creation of "blends" -- essentially mashups between the generes of soul, hip-hop, reggae, dancehall, disco, and dub (other notable actors in this genre include Red Astaire, Freddy Crueger, Dr Rubberfunk, Mark E, Beatconductor, 7 Samurai, Nostalgia 77, and just about anyone who appears on a GAMM Enterprises release). This particular track happens to be a dreamy soundclash between Toni Braxton's "Unbreak My Heart"* and Lee "Scratch" Perry's "Words of My Mouth," and it originally came out last year. I put "Unbreak My Dub" up in my vast iTunes archive some months ago without listening to it first, and then was stunned by when it finally dropped in the shuffle a few days back...I especially loved how the whole thing has that sort of lo-fi tinny-crunchy sound of 70s' era Lee Perry productions (though that could also be a reflection of the quality of this vinyl to mp3 transfer). In any case, for a brief while, colors seemed brighter, shadows seemed darker, all the world around me came into perfect contrast, clairity, and focus. And then the magic was gone. [Seems to be out of stock at most UK shops, but apparently Fat City still has a copy or two...] *Currently becoming notorious in North America due to its inclusion in a seemingly ubiquitous TV ad for Citibank about identity theft--which itself refers to the song's undying popularity amongst [any country name here] Idol contestants worldwide. gimme a holla | 15 hollas heard Thu 31 August 2006
back to the monastery of sound  Well I guess we can all chalk 2006 down as "The Year That Ate Moe Rex" as it seems the one constant with me lately is my being very, very spotty and inconsistent, and even downright missing in action a lot of the time. Oh well. Here I am again. Let's see how long it takes people to figure out I've put up something new.... Grails "Black Tar Frequencies" - I figured what better song for my return from the dark ether than this awesomely eldritch broadcast by Grails, a Portland foursome who specialize in a weird sort of instrumentally supercerebal folk-damaged psych-rock. It sounds literally like something you might faintly hear bubbling up out of sewer drains well after midnight in Dead Town, a sound that, if you were to set off on an expedition to track it back to its source, would lead you on a long descent: through rat-infested storm drains, down slick and dripping access tunnels, past long-forgotten subway annexes, and across cursed Indian graveyards. In the end, you'll uncover Grails' vast subterranean concert hall, where--lit by the pale fire of phosphorescent algae and bioluminescent bats--a shadowy four-piece band plays to a huge audience of enraptured cellar-dwelling weirdlings. And before you know it, before you can put up even a pretense of resistance, you're down on the concert floor with them, swaying in unison to Grails' deep, deep rhythm forevermore. Goodbye, blue skies. Hello, black tar. If you're not interested in physically taking this doomed one-way trip to the netherworld, you can buy Grails' latest LP, Black Tar Prophecies vol's 1, 2, and 3--a collection of previously-released and generally quite rare European 12-inches, plus two new tracks--and just tell people you did, but somehow lived to return and tell the tale. [Buy it at Forced Exposure (US) or Boomkat (UK).] Radiq (feat. Paul St. Hilaire) "The Grass Roots (Radiq's Babylon Dub Mix)" - Damn, I burned through my entire ration of subterranean imagery on that last track, and here we are with this wonderfully heavy chunk of dubwise electronica from Yoshihiro Hanno (aka Radiq). Oh well, just going to have to do the best I can. This comes direct from a 12-inch EP featuring remixes of "The Grass Roots," a track from Tomorrow's Quest, Radiq's recent full-length release. The EP also features excellent remixes by Afuken and Dimbiman, but Radiq's own version of the track was the one I liked best--it takes a somewhat traditional deep-bass dub sound and arcwelds a crazed and fractal grillwork of experimental electronic percussion around its perimeters. About two-thirds of the way in, a string orchestra glides in out of nowhere and sort of smooths the track out momentarily before it explodes in a penultimate frenzy of beats and infinite echo. Vocals are provided by the always-awesome Paul St. Hilaire (formerly Tikiman), best known for his varying collaborations with German dubmasters Rhythm & Sound. [Buy it at Boomkat (UK); also available in mp3 form via Bleep.] San Quinn "Holdin' Back These Years" - This is a track I've been wanting to share for a few months now, ever since San Quinn's The Rock: Pressure Makes Diamonds dropped earlier this year. For those of you who don't follow the Bay Area hip-hop scene, San Quinn is a San Francisco-based rapper whose projected profile tends to be that of the quintessential gangsta, tougher than adamantium and meaner than a rabid, three-headed pitbull. So as you might expect, The Rock is made up of one steroidal slap after another, tracks packed with enough corner king braggadocio and tough talk tall tale-spinning to hold you over for weeks. Which is why this joint, which comes along fairly deep into the album, really threw me for a loop when it first turned up on my stereo. Because who would expect a harder-than-hard, more macho-than-macho G like San Quinn to turn around and put out a wistful hard-luck-life reverie based entirely around a song by...Simply Red? It's the sort of thing that makes you stop in your tracks the moment you first hear it (lucky I didn't, though, because I was driving on a freeway at the time). Despite the fact that I'm growing a bit weary of the gangsta aspect of the hyphy scene, now that it's become evermore apparent that as hyphy rises in prominence, so too does the Bay Area body count,* I have to say I heart this track enormously, especially the manner in which Quinn's flow occasionally plays call and response with Mick Hucknall's sampled vocals. It's a slow burner, but it's got real heart, and if you play it in a crowded room, people will listen, guaranteed. [Yo, keepin' it real is a habit, man. Buy it at Amazon.] Jay-R "My Other Car Is A Beatle" - I know that a handful of folks out there amongst the mp3 blogscene have pushed this track at one point or another over the summer, but I figure there have got to be a few more pairs of ears out there that have yet to pick up on it. If those left-out ears happen to be yours, well you're in for a tasty treat, for this is a turbocharged nitroburning funnycar bastard pop romp that features Gary Numan's "Cars," L'Trim's "The Cars That Go Boom," Armand Van Helden, and a bit of The Beatles' "Drive My Car." It's unbelievably good, as far as this sort of thing goes, and one of the highlights of The Best Mashups In The World Ever Come From San Francisco 2, a compilation CD that you should be able to find at various Bay Area and Los Angeles record stores while supplies last (and probably other places 'round the country as well, keep yr peepers peeped). This compilation, like its predecessor was put together by a lot of the same people who are also behind Bootie, the long-running San Francisco-based club night that celebrates everything bastardly and poppy and mush-mashed up real good. [UK folks, don't feel left out, you can get it at Juno!] *I can't say there's a direct connection, but all the same I get a bit twitchy when it comes to promoting artists whose music celebrates the same culture of violence that gets kids shot dead in real life. I feel like I might as well sing the praises of Hezbollah marching songs, White Power oi jams, or the playlist on George Bush's iPod. All I have to say down here is yikes, where did the summer go? And yikes, where did I go? I'm still trying to figure it all out. Well, keep yr fingers crossed for a relatively timely entry to follow this one. I'm making no promises...have learned my lesson on that score the hard way. My non-musical link of the day: Olbermann's response to Rumsfeld's speech, in which Rumsfeld basically equated criticism of the Iraq war and Bush administration foreign policy with appeasement of Nazis. About time someone in the cable news media started talking like this. More, much more, please. And now...off to Wisconsin, for a short little family get-together over the Labor Day weekend. Hope all's well for you and yours, wherever you are. gimme a holla | 28 hollas heard Fri 2 June 2006
let all yr basslines be unbound  Sometimes, when you go away, the hardest thing to do is come back. There's an event horizon that you pass, and afterwards, each successive opportunity for return seems somehow evermore diminishing. You spin around and are frightened by the lateness of the day, by the way your shadow just stretches and stretches down the street, all the way to the hazy edge. So much time has passed...surely they must have forgotten you by now? Is there really a "there" to return to? Was it all a dream? Well here's a thanks to all my friends and fans who made absolutely sure to remind me that I was, in fact, missed . And apologies to everyone. I do go AWOL from time to time, it's true, but this was an astonishingly long break. But most of all, here's to the music that wakes us up, that keeps the earth moving under our feet, that reminds us that change is gonna come, that sends us to sleep with dreams of bold new tomorrows. Tolcha "Rising Tides (feat. Rider Shafique and RQM)" - Here's the first of four tracks that have two things in common: awesomely tectonic levels of bass...and Berlin, that lovely, sweatsoaked, circuitry enwrapped European metropolis that is the pulsating vortex of so much midnight sound and motion nowadays. Tolcha, for example, hail from that city's shadowy, subterranean domains, where they turn out tracks that I can only describe as masterful blends of dub, dubstep, grime, and bleeding-edge alt.hip-hop. After bruising ears with a couple of 12" releases, Tolcha finally delivered their debut LP, Gestalt, via Meta Polyp, their new "digi-hop" label, and I'm pleased to report that it's a stunning work of cybernoir mystery and intrigue, with features from a variety of talented rappers and toasters out of Germany, the UK, and the US, including Sasha Perera (of Jahcoozi), Al-Haca, Ras T-Weed (of Rockers HiFi), Maxx (of The Goats) and Neonman, among others. There's a pretty strong chance that it'll find its way onto my personal tops of the year list, actually. As a case in point, I love the insidious slow creep of this track, the way it seems to be loping along, watching you over your shoulder, waiting for the perfect moment to pounce. And then you have UK soundbwoy Rider Shafique joining forces with rapper RQM (best known for his collaborations with The Tape and Al-Haca) to spit out the deepest lyrics this side of the Marianas Trench. You're swimming down there with them, feeling the crushing pressure of the urban life, finding your way forward using the faint light from bioluminescent graffiti, putting all of your strength into meditations on a life free from stress and strife. Drumming in there like a fetus in a mom's pregnant belly / This is the equivalent of royal jelly / With some ginseng and ginko / Here to stimulate and make you think fo / a minute about it's good to be alive. [buy it at Forced Exposure (US)!] Muallem "Are You Ready (Turn Off The Lights) (feat. Amazon)" - As we continue cruise our way into the realm of posthuman cyborgian 21st century hiphop, take a listen to the chrome-burnished beats of this joint by Munich's* Muallem, from his recent LP release Frankie Splits. It's the kind of punch to the face that you find yourself setting yourself up for over and over again, perhaps because it's being delivered by a female MC who sounds like she can sling punishing verbiage, dominate the dancefloor, and tear up the bedsheets in equal measure. I know that, elsewhere, music bloggers have celebrated some of the other guest spots on this album (Beans, Lyrics Born, The Droids, Shawn Lee (of UNKLE) all make appearances) but this track is the one I keep coming back to for more. Are you willing to stay 'till they turn off the the lights? Hells yeah, you are. [buy it at Amazon (US)!] Team Shadetek "Brooklyn Anthem (feat. 77Klash and Jahdan)" - Though Team Shadetek moved from Manhattan to Berlin to get Pale Fire their debut LP, together (recording in, among other places, Modeselektor's studios), my initial takeaway after hearing a rough cut of the upcoming record** is that it's the best representation of a truly American version of grime and ragga that I've heard thus far (for what it's worth). The version I heard stretched out to eighteen or so pyrotechnic tracks of soundestruktion and earbone jamming frequencies, with a whole stack of interesting dancehall and hip-hop MCs doing their thing throughout. (My version of the advance didn't list who was on each track, and I'm not gonna try to guess, though a few voices sounded pretty damn familiar....) What I can tell you is that "Brooklyn Anthem"--featuring vox by 77Klash and Jahdan, two NYC-based dancehall MCs--is their first official single for Pale Fire, and as such it gives you a pretty decent idea of what you'll be in for in a few months, though I'd argue that it's definitely not the most dynamic cut on the record. But this track will sound great at your next Prospect Heights soundclash blockparty experience--not only will it get everyone up and down the street dancing and pumping fists out they windows--it'll set all the car alarms in the vicinity off as well. [Buy it at Boomkat (UK)!] The Field "Over The Ice" - And finally, to even your Friday out and set you into a smooth and cotton-encased glidepath to the weekend, here's a new slice of techno from the fine folks over at Kompakt (keeping the German thing going, yeah...though The Field is actually a Swedish producer by the name of Axel Willner). It's glacially cool, with finely looped divavox and [what sounds like] classical strings, and that ever-present bassboom heartbeat rhythm overlaying everything like a eiderdown comforter. Depending upon your musical predilections, the final effect will either provoke sensations of smothered claustrophobia or comfort and peace (accompanied by semi-involuntary headnodding)--I choose the latter, of course. [Buy The Field's Sun and Ice 12" at Boomkat (UK) or Forced Exposure (US)!] *ok, yeah, not exactly Berlin. But Berlin's not a long trainride away.... ** supposed to be out sometime in Sept/Oct as of this writing Whew! Anyway, back, I am! Got a job, got my life in order, things are looking bright.... gimme a holla | 38 hollas heard Mon 10 April 2006
oh no it's a beat that you're missing!  Bell X1 "Flame (Chicken Lips Mix)" - So here's the deal: Despite the fact that Bell X1 is huge, huge, huge in its home country, with Flock, its third album, going straight to the top of the Ireland pop charts in the first week of its October 2005 release--so far this remixed track (and the much more abstract Solid Groove remix that it came packaged with) is the only thing I've ever heard by them, though I've seen their name 'round here and there over the years (and have always assumed, for some reason, that they were a techno act, maybe on account of their name, which sounds kinda like it could be a high-end synthesizer of some sort). And it's sad, actually, because this is the sort of stuff I most feel like listening to on this sunny Saturday afternoon: jaunty, disco-fabulous indiepop loveballads chock full of all of the finest hooting and holleration and the best David Byrne-esque vox this side of The Arcade Fire.** I don't know how this happens, how I miss the interoffice memo on bands like this.* Perhaps I need to break down and actually sit through an entire season of The OC--that's where a track from Music In Mouth, Bell X1's sophomore LP, appeared last year. Despite the fact that it looks to my jaded eyes like a retread of Melrose Place for the Naughty Oughties, it cannot be denied that The OC is introducing a lot more cool music to the masses than your average primetime teenage mashnote soap opera. I wanna be near you and blink in your light / and toast marshmallows on a cold dark night. There's my chorus of the week, folks.*** Run down the sundappled sidewalk while rattling a great big cowbell and sing it to the top stories. [If you live in Ireland or the UK you can buy Flock at Amazon.co.uk or pretty much the music vendor of your choice. In the US, though, you'll have to put up with heavy import charges on copies via Amazon. Get the Flame EP at Phonica (UK).] Herbert "Birds of a Feather" - It was a slow-dawning morning after an endless night of pouring rain and oil-slick dreams. On the kitchen table, I found a note and a rather large ivory box. The note read: Until just a few moments ago, we were lost, lost in the Aviary. The noise was deafening! Parrots squawking, cockatoos and vocatively arguing from the highest trees. All manner of chirping and hooting and wild birdly chatter...the very universe seemed to be erupting in bewildering cacophony, and it erased our sense of place, of time, of direction almost entirely. To make sense of this place, this landscape, this situation we found ourselves in, we set to work organizing the noise against a steady rhythm: finding the signal amongst the noise. We almost missed the beat, but we found it, and we tied it down, and we made it plot our way through the thicket of unruly sound. Still, this wasn't enough, visibility was still minimal at best, and we risked stumbling into one or more of the many gilded, man-size cages that had been left as traps for incautious birdwatchers. So we finessed the mix with our trademark ace in the pocket: beautiful arrangements of symphonic jazz melody: horns, strings, bits of romantically plucked acoustic guitar. It smoothed the rough edges right over, locked those cagedoors shut, gave us a clear path to the exit. But we couldn't leave our aural lifeline behind, so we recorded it, and Dani worked her final bit of magic: she added her voice over the track, retold a version of our adventure in the form of a song. When the track was complete, we were free. Open the gift and hear it for yourself. So I did what my friend said, and I won't lie: I was puzzled at first. Within the ivory cube I found what looked like an immaculately white ostrich egg resting on pale gray satin, perfect in its ovoid simplicity. When I picked it up, I discovered that it was as light as air, however, and resonated with the faint anarchy of hundreds of birdcalls when jostled. I steeled myself, broke the shell over the sink, and the kitchen was momentarily filled with the most amazing sound. For a brief moment I saw the Aviary myself, and was almost captured. [From Herbert's new album Scale, which is still upcoming, as far as I can tell. I've seen some statements that it was released May 30, but if so, it's not being carried by many stores yet. Check !K7 for more details.] Voom Voom "Oggi" - We here at the R. R. Moe Rex Aural Joy Research Institute can't help but turn our ears to the bright, clean, future-forward-yet-oddly-retro sound of Detroit-style electrotechno when it's done well; this track by Voom Voom (a project of Peter Kruder (of, yea, Kruder & Dorfmeister), Christian Prommer, and Roland Appel (both of Truby Trio and Fauna Flash) had our ears set to vibrate and our heads spinning with reckless abandonment. Those synths, those arpeggios, those handclaps, those bright, crystalline synth tones. They roar right along until...what is that, a Blade Runner-esque sample straight out of Eno and Byrne's My Life In The Bush of Ghosts in the middle? Brilliant. That's followed by a brief interlude of lush keyboard melodies, which in turn fade out for a last few moments of wind-down electro rhythm. Cool as a tall glass of lemon-essenced sparkling water on a spring afternoon, and maybe twice as refreshing. This is currently available on the third of four Voom Voom vinyl-only 12" releases; after all four are released the entire set of twelve tracks will be made available in the form of the LP Peng Peng. All of the tracks clock in at 125 bpm for easy mixing, but they display a fairly amazing variety of approaches and styles of creative attack, sometimes seeming to veer tricksterlike from electro to techno to house to a sort of loopy spaceage funk without ever shifting tempo. The end result: addictive listening experience du jour, par excellance, and so forth. Rawr. [Get "Oggi" on the third of the Voom Voom Peng Peng EPs at Juno (UK), or wait 'till Peng Peng comes out in a month or so (as above, check !K7 for more news on Peng Peng.).] *I'm guessing it has a bit of something to do with the fact that Bell X1 is so far mostly an Irish act--they only started to sell out their UK shows in the past few months. But they sound like they'd kill here in the States the moment someone gives them a bit of domestic distribution. **Apparently Bell X1 also gets compared to Radiohead a lot--and comparisons of that sort always raise red flags in my mind, because nothing sounds worse than watered-down Thom Yorke imitations a la Coldplay--but I'm not hearing that here. ***Even though it sorta provides a ticklish image of a bedheaded hipster character holding a stickful of marshmallows over his beloved's beautiful brow, waiting in vain for them to get nice 'n melty-crispy. Oh pop music, you are so delightfully silly sometimes! gimme a holla | 10 hollas heard Fri 31 March 2006
Ghostriding To Glory On The Yellow Bus  Well, it should be fairly obvious that March 2006 will eventually go down in the history books as The Month When Hyphy Broke. I mean really broke. Sure, the hardcore hip hop heads of the world have been well aware of what's been going down in the Yay Area since Federation first dropped "Hyphy" back in 2004, but it took the much ballyhooed release of E-40's My Ghetto Report Card to actually push this thing past the tipping point. I don't think I'm overstating this--when long-overlooked rappers like E-40 and his 18-year-old genius producer son Droop-E end up with a full-page spread in the NYT Sunday A&E section, you just know the jig is up.* So now here we are, with hyphy and thizzin' poised to finally, at long last, replace crunk as the leading street hip-hop sound of the land. It's a pretty heady time, and though I'll probably never pass as an expert in this stuff, I feel obliged to serve up a post with a few of my favorite recent New Bay slaps. Yay Area stand up, yadadamean!!! Balance "Let The Bass Go" - At the risk of going all Stephen Colbert on your ass, I just gotta say: I called it. In my fancypants SF Weekly interview last summer, I told folks to keep their eyes popped for the debut Balance album, that in my opinion it was going to be a real slammer when it finally dropped. This opinion was based entirely on a few tracks of his I'd heard on various locally-produced mixtapes around town; you could tell he had the gravity and lyrical flow to turn out a truly asphalt-shattering LP if he had the chance. Well, Young & Restless dropped last week and it delivers the goods: block-rocking soundwork from Bay Area superproducers like E-A-Ski and Rick Rock, a beefy strongman vocal flow, with lyrical chops that resonate for days, and guest appearances from local luminaries like Keak Da Sneak and The Frontline as well as notable outliers such as Chamillionare. Balance--who up 'till now was far better known for his dj skills as "DJ Balance The Bay Area Mixtape King"--has finally proven he is a fully well-rounded as his street name suggests. "Let The Bass Go" is the opening cut on the new record, and it's an E-A-Ski production through and through, lined with exactly the sort of velvety smooth bass riddims that you might expect, given the song's title. A great deal of New Bay** rap is designed for urban driving; the wild and crazy tracks (see below) were almost expressly designed for "stupid, dumb, and retarded" automotive hijinx like ghostriding the whip or swinging your candy-color scraper at one of Oakland's notorious sideshows. But cuts like "Let The Bass Go" are for city driving experiences of an, er, more subtle nature: long cruises down the interminably long avenues that stretch across the length and breadth of the East Bay after an evening partying at the clubs, or long 3 am hauls across one of the Bay Area bridges after completing some sort of underworld deal. Music for forward motion, sure and straight, with intensity of purpose always forefront in the lyrical delivery and the beat that undergirds it. [Buy it at Amazon (US) or wherever quality hip-hop is sold.] E-40 feat. Stress-Matic "The Dummy" - And here's the rubber-band voiced hero of the New Bay himself, E-40, collaborating with Stress-Matic on one of many tracks that cheerlead the "GO D-U-M-B!" aspect of the hyphy scene, which, for all the brothers from other planets out there, basically translates to "partying like a damn fool 'till you cain't party no more." Or at least, that's the basic gist of it, anyway. You can find this track on the The Bay Bridges Compilation, Vol. 1, a various artists collection that was entirely produced by Droop-E, E-40's amazingly talented son. Those solid production chops are in full effect here--those bubbly acid synth lines serve to perk up the ears of any body within listening range, while the minimal beats emphasize the rubberband vocal calisthenics that E-40 and Stress-Matic put on display. The chorus repeats a certain hyphy catchphrase almost ad-infinitum: I do the dummy retarded and ride the yellow bus. Now, if you haven't heard that one already, prepare yourself, because I have a pretty good feeling it's going to be well-nigh inescapable before the year is out. [Pick up E-40 Presents: The Bay Bridges Compilation, Vol. 1 from RapBay (US).] Mistah F.A.B. feat Messy Marv and Mr Kev "City Limits" - Oh, man. You just can't beat a strong, street-based rap track about the Sucka Free City that successfully uses the theme from "Streets of San Francisco" as its backing track. This is East Oakland's Mistah F.A.B., definitely of the more risingest stars of the of the Bay Scene, reporting atcha with fellow SF rappers Messy Marv and Mr. Kee on support. This stunna strikes like a piledriver and takes no mercy, but I'm also drawn to it because it's one of the rare Yay Area tracks to actually focus on my city. 95% of hyphy hip-hop is revolves around Vallejo, East Oakland, Hayward, and other locations in the east bay--with the exception of snarky references to the crazy rents and cost of living here, San Francisco rarely rates even a mention. You can find this track on Son of a Pimp, Mistah F.A.B.'s brilliant sophomore LP, released last fall. Along with gangsta bangers like "City Limits" and the requisite hyphy club tracks***, the album also includes a number of unusually deep and at times even painfully autobiographical works like "Mama Song," "Where's My Daddy," and "U R My Angel," in which Mistah F.A.B. reveals that his mother was a drug addict, that his father was indeed a pimp who eventually died from AIDS, and that his brother served ten years in a penitentiary while Fabby was growing up. It's totally worth an investment of your listening time and money.[Buy it at Amazon (US).] Mistah F.A.B. and Scweez "Stupid, Dumb, Hyphy" - Damn, couldn't resist slinging out another slice from the madcap mind of Mistah Fabby Davis Jr. It's based on "I Think They Like Me," a track by Dem Franchize Boys that seems to've attracted the rework and remix treatment from a variety of Bay Area based folk (see also Goldie Gold's "Oh They Think They Hyphy"). It is pretty much what it says it is: dumb as a sack of hammers, stupid as a long ghostride off a short pier, and hyphy as all get out. In other words: it's gravy--slop it on that soundsystem and blast it tight to get your party grooving right. *And perhaps not just up but over--it's long been my suspicion that whenever the Gray Lady catches on to a music trend, it usually means that trend has peaked and is on its way out. **"New Bay" is a term that Balance originally coined, btw. ***Coincidentally, Fabby coined the above-mentioned "I do the dummy retarded and ride the yellow bus" catchphrase in "Supa Sic Wid It," another track from Son Of A Pimp. His next album will be titled The Yellow Busdrivah. I'd be a fool to try to give the impression that I know the hip-hop terrain of the New Bay through and through--it's so dynamic and ever-changing that you really need to specialize in it to do it justice, and obviously, most of the time, my focus is on other sorts of musics from other parts of the world. Luckily for us, the frighteningly exponential growth of the mp3 blog scene over the past year or so brought with it a good handful of excellent New Bay-focused blogs to keep us somewhat on top of the local game. Unfortunately, the maniest of these blogs--notable for its amazing ability to grab onto exclusive and at times more underground-than-underground tracks--was Get Stoopid, and it ceased operations for whatever reason at the end of last year. But the silver lining on that raincloud is the fact that shortly before that happened, all the tracks on Get Stoopid were re-upped to RapidShare and are (as of this writing anyway) still very much available. Go there now to get a good musical primer on all things stupid, dumb, hyphy and Yay Area, while you still can. And there are a number of notable and still quite operative music blogs in a Yay state of mind out there for your education and entertainment. They include Nation of Thizzlam, Strivin', Yay Mecca, Pacific Standard (recently moved to Melatone Music), and The Bay Area, which makes up for its not terribly imaginative name by providing a fairly decent selection of tracks. Also notable is Bay.Watch!, a newish blog by someone named Teemoney ("T$" for short, heh) that offers lots of great pics, video clips, interviews, and essays in place of mp3s. I liked Teemoney's recent hyphy essay (great shots of hyphy dancin'!) and Droop-E interview. gimme a holla | 11 hollas heard Fri 24 March 2006
we don't blog music for nerds to make math to  Juiceboxxx "Do U Want 2 Hear It?" - Get your crash helmet on and hold on tight, because Juiceboxxx, the rappin' kid wonder of Mequon, Wisconsin, is here. Though he's generally not that well known outside of the Milwaukee metropolitan area, I get the impression that it's only a matter of time before a virulent attack of Juiceboxxx mania eventually takes root across the globe. Here's why I feel this way: The average Juiceboxxx tune is basically the aural equivalent of one of those really noisy MySpace pages, complete with lurid color clashes, clusterbombs of obscene animated gifts, unfortunate photographs of wide-eyed gawkygeeky teens in embarrassing situations, and insane exclamation-point-peppered 36 pt boasts in migraine-inducing l337 speak and clipped text message syntax. When you consider the number of MySpace pages, Xanga accounts, and Livejournals that adopt this graphic design scheme (well past a million, I'd guess), it just stands to reason that Juiceboxx--a wiry 19-going-on-14-year-old otaku type* who generally rocks his live shows wearing little more than sunglasses, a necklace or two, track pants, and sneakers--could be the next big teenpop superstar. All he needs a push to get the ball rolling a bit.** Or...maybe I'd be better off just waiting for monkeys to fly out of my butt. In any case, this Juiceboxxx is good for a listen, a laugh, a raucous pogo dance around the family room and on the couch. (Just don't let mom catch you!) Sure, it's way cheesy...but it is from Wisconsin, after all. [Buy R U There God? Itz Me...Juiceboxxx direct from Vicious Pop Records, a brand-new Wisconsin-based label that, as it turns out, will also soon be putting out a new EP from Tittsworth, the much ballyhooed prodigy of the B'more club scene.] Headman "Everybody (featuring Ben Rymer and Erol Alkan)" - On, the new Headman album, contains a big ol' stack of that crowdpleasing discodancepunk stuff, with all sorts of musicians and guest vocalists partying as if it were NYC circa 1981 in pretty much the same mode as the DFA, OutHud, !!!, and their various overwrought legions of retrohipster imitators, cowbells, bongos, and all. So you'll either find more to love there or tons to hate, all depending upon whether or not your patience with that sort of thing has given out. To be honest, when the whole electrohouse/dancepunk/mutantdisco revival started up in earnest a few years back, I was pretty much over it the moment I first heard it. It wasn't until LCD Soundsystem put out "Losing My Edge" that I started to make my peace with the whole thing, because that could've easily been me expressing all that snarky "I was there...." sentiment and jaded outlook towards the current musical tableaux rather than James Murphy. It was mighty refreshing to hear someone mocking that scene (and the snobs who ridiculed it, such as myself) while simultaneously producing some of the greatest examples of the genre. It was a sort of "how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb," moment, perhaps. Of course, Headman certainly isn't any James Murphy or DFA--not by a longshot--but I can't help liking "Everybody," a bonus track tacked onto the end of the album that was probably intended to be a sort of throwaway deal. On one hand, it's unabashedly stupid, relying on the sort of insipid pun that somehow gets funnier through dogged repetition (a comedy tactic that fans of David Letterman should be well familiar of). On the other, it's a solid dancefloor burner, the sort of thing that should keep things bumping along even as it provokes a chuckle or two here and there. And finally, who can't love a dancepunk song in which Erol Alkan and Ben "Fat Trucker" Rymer, of all people, provides vox and proceeds to serve up shoutouts to the likes of Tiga, Soulwax, and Trevor Jackson? In summation: dumb, sure, but also dancable and quite delightful, in a perverse kinda way. [Buy On at Juno (UK).] The Blow "The Love That I Crave (Strategy's Strata Club Remix)" - To be bluntly honest now, I'm really only just barely coming around to the brilliant candy shop of wonders that is the current Portland music scene, mostly courtesy of the Audio Dregs label and the amazing artists that are linked to it either directly or tangentially. Another Stumptown musical touchstone is Holocene, a nightclub that has apparently taken on the mission of bringing the more forward-thinking facets of Portland's music community into focus and instigating brilliant mixes and matches of local talent. The bountiful fruits of their efforts are demonstrated on It's Importland to Me To Be One Step Further Than One Step Beyond, a remix compilation from Holocene's new record label that features a variety of collaborations between artists located in or near the Portland metropolitan area (Menomena remixed by Talkdemonic, Y.A.C.H.T. remixed by Emergency Ghost, Bobby Birdman remixed by Toothfairy, Hustler White remixed by a certain DJ ASSCLAPP, and so on). In doing so, the comp paints a picture of a seemingly mythical city in which laptop glitch kidz, psychedelic folksters, IDM nerds, electropunk revival scenesters, indierock clubbers, gritty garage band assassins, and brigadiers of the experimental music avant garde somehow gather together in common ground to found new harmonies, new aural domains, new theories of sound. ImPortland, city of the future of music? Well, it's one of them, anyway. This electropop + dubwise Strategy remix of The Blow is one of my fave tracks on the It's Importland.... comp, and it will probably come as no surprise that it's also going to be one of Holocene's first 12" singles as well. It drops you into a lush constellation of lovely female vox that whirl and spin around your head even as a rich house beat whips your feets into synchronized motion; when amazing lines like "the love that I crave is a polar bear to gore me" caress your ears, you won't flinch one bit. My research on The Internets has taught me that The Blow is mostly the work of a bewitching lass by the name of Khalea Maricich who is already well-known to everyone that matters via her releases on Kill Rock Stars. Apparently, Ms Maricich's bewitching stage presence and general joi de vive have inspired huge chunks of the Pacific Northwest hipster population to develop intense, heartstopping crushes upon her that seem to defy all conventions of gender and sexual orientation.*** Given that, I'm not sure if it would be a good idea for me to catch The Blow when they next come to San Francisco--my wife will probably require me to attend with a blindfold on and ears plugged with candlewax, so as to block out Maricich's siren-like powers, and what's the point of that? [The It's Importland To Me.... comp supposedly won't be officially released until April 18, though I've seen limited copies of the album available here and there online. You can get The Blow's "The Love That I Crave" 12" from Boomkat (UK) and Audraglint Recordings (US).] Music A.M. "Stars On 45" - Last but not least, here's a track from the bran' new Music A.M. release Unwound From The Wood, a joint project between whispery voiced crooner Luke Sutherland (formerly of Long Fin Killie and Bows), Stefan Schneider (also of To Rococo Rot) and Volker Bertelmann. I like how it starts out in a woozy, lithium-medicated haze, as if all the instruments and even the vocalist were wrapped in bandages, and gradually builds up to some semblance of pop radio bombast before going abruptly dark, all lights out. Music A.M. is known for creating smooth fusions of click/cut electronics and acoustic instruments that are both tranquil and tranquilized, soothing and somnolent. But "Stars on 45" is an example of a handful of tracks on Unwound that exhibit a new willingness to open up a bit of dynamic tension within the band's standard sonic gameplan, which should please both longtime fans and new listeners. For best results, play it just before you go to sleep or right after you wake. [Buy it at Forced Exposure (US) or Juno (UK)] *At least, he's supposed to be that young. For all we know this could be another carefully contrived Andy Milonakis-style age scam, and Juiceboxxx is actually a 38-year-old substitute teacher who is supporting two teenage kids from his first marriage. But I hope not. **Actually, music critic Jessica Hopper gave the Juiceboxxx a few good squeezes last year, but apparently her patronage wasn't enough to set off significant popstar-fame brushfires for Our Hero. I dunno if this entry will get him any closer to being a household name, but every bit of kindling helps, I suppose.... ***One commenter to You Ain't No Picasso was actually driven to say that Ms. Maricich is "really awesome at thrusting her hips on stage." Obviously she's on a mission to return such moves to the occult status that people used to apply Elvis Presley's onstage antics way way back in the day. Well. It's been a crazy few weeks: unemployment hysteria, job interview neurotics, a trip to visit my parents in Colorado, computer breakdowns, and internet connectivity snafus. Plus also writer's block. I'm kinda burned out! Will write more in my next post. Ask me interesting questions in the comments, though, and I'll try my best to give you some interesting answers. gimme a holla | 10 hollas heard Thu 2 March 2006
captain kid bling's patented funtime bass + beats therapy, just for you  This post features a set of far-out bass-heavy sound explorations for y'alls pleasure & enjoyment. Guaranteed to make seismograph needles bounce off the charts all over yr hood, or yr money back. Meanwhile, back in the UK, Glyn "Bigga" Bush--the DJ, producer, and former Rockers Hi-Fi member--has his psychic shortwave apparatus switched on, scanning incessantly for the most infectious and soul-enriching sounds in world music and occasionally remixing them as "Biggabush" and "Lightning Head," the latter moniker being reserved for the fusion of "the funkiest aspects of Jamaican, Nu Yorican, and Brazillian sounds into a joyful soundclash of dub, salsa, and batucada." In January 2006 he released the mix album "Sound Sensation," which presents a masterful blend of a surprisingly disparate group of styles (latin jazz, dubstep, Ghanian funk, dancehall, dub, reggae, salsa) and artists (Robert Wyatt, Kode9, dj/rupture, Pressure Drop, Up, Bustle, and Out). And one of the best tracks on the record happens to be his "Lightning Head" version of "Midnight Marauders," which uses the languid tone of the original as its foundation and then ratchets up the energy level by quite a few notches I just love the way this mix starts out--a tiny bit of echoey guitar and then the sound of crickets chirping; it's late at night on a Wellington summer's eve and you're taking a bit of respite from a neighborhood house party, getting yourself a bit of cool air on the back porch with a frosty bottle of Mac's Wicked Blonde in hand, as a couple of your mates strum on a guitar and start to do a bit of soulful singing. But no respite lasts forever, especially at this party--and before too long you've got an amazing latin percussion jam going on right there in the backyard. Lightning fast beats are making feets move all over the place, and off in the distance you can hear the neighborhood dogs starting to howl along with the joyous noise. [Buy the original "Midnight Marauders" 12" (containing original + dub versions) from the Sonar Kollectiv. If you live in the UK, you can purchase the vinyl 2XLP version of Sound Sensation now from Juno (it's missing 6 tracks that are on the CD); meanwhile folks in the US will have to preorder their copy of the CD; it's supposed to be available April 25.] This track, which was remixed to some degree by Larvae, is actually quite swoonworthy, in all senses of the word. I love how the vox swell up like shortwave transmissions in the composition's opening moments, drawing you in even as the beats gradually start kicking into high gear. Breakcore often goes out of its way to be as abrasive and mindshredding as possible, but not so here--the beauty of the Hindi vocals somehow act as a perfect counterpoint to the jagged edges of the beats, enfolding them lovingly in a sort of "paper wraps rock" sort of gesture. In the end, both teams come out on top, to our enormous benefit. [You can order a copy of the Bollywood Breaks EP directly through Ad Noisiam.] I'll come out and just say it straight: I'm a bit of an idiot savant when it comes to sourcing the music for this space that's not already been passed my way by kindly friends, fans, artists, bands, distributors, labels, and promotion people. Because I've generally been more about breadth rather than depth of musical knowledge, most of my music-loving life (which basically takes me from about age four on up), I've never been the sort who settles on a chosen musical sound, style, or subgenre and then somehow mindmelds with all of the scholars, uberfans, and leading thinkers/creators/producers working in that area to get a detailed 3D analytical model of that scene's past, present, and future up and spinning in in my mind's eye. I just don't have the patience for that kind of sustained focus of concentration. The world's far, far too big; there are way too many distracting bright and shiny musics out there to for me to stay tuned to one station for very long. What I tend to do instead is flit from place to place and topic to topic, spelunking through newly discovered realms of subterranian sound and panning for gold in mountain streams of underheard music, searching always for the unique, the moving, the truly remarkable. Along the way I pick up a lot of facts about a lot of things, but I'm usually moving too fast and too erratically to develop detailed mental databases about anything. And somehow I find myself stumbling across a wide variety of offbeat sounds that I can't wait to tell the rest of you about. It's a state of affairs that's uniquely suited to the eclectic-minded musicblogger--you never stay on one topic long enough to bore either yourself or your readers, and you always manage to keep in some sort of touch with the big picture(s) of where things are going, musically. But the flipside of this scattershot music sourcing methodology is that you end up depending upon journalists, academics, DJs, and bloggers with deep-rooted knowedge of specific musical territories to guide you to the newest sounds on the map. Which is why all of this exposition has really been a preamble to explain why I'm dedicating this post to my friend Matt Earp, aka Kid Kameleon; he's all of those things and more, and in my opinion, he's masterfully documenting and promoting the sounds found at the locus of the ragga, grime, dub, dubstep, breakcore, hip hop, bmore bounce, and mashup scenes, which collectively represents a good chunk of the most forward-thinking and truly 21st century music your ears can hear at present.* Two of my selections for this post (Eight Frozen Modules and Enduser) were directly inspired by mentions in both his blog and his brand-new monthly column "Everlasting Bass," which debuted in the March issue of XLR8R magazine, and the other two are more-or-less tangentially related to the sort of stuff he writes about and/or plays in his DJ sets. If you ever have the chance to see Kid Kamelion play, do take advantage of it (bonus for you if DJ Ripley, his chief partner-in-crime, is on the bill as well!). In the meantime you can read his writings at XLR8R, Grooves, the group blog Riddim Method, and his personal blog, which also links to several of the many DJ mixes he's done for folks all over the globe. Check this stuff out, and get knowledgized. *As much as I love the retrostylings of recent musics inspired by 80's electro and late 70's post-punk and/or mutant disco, it's nice to know that somewhere people are still daring to make truly new stuff. The coffeeshop where I'm writing this--a caffeination HQ for all the best-of-breed technohipsters in San Francisco--has been on an awful music kick as of late: the last few times I've come in, they've been playing a mix that I can only classify as "The Most Horrible Music Ever Made in the Eighties." All the scenester baristas are singing along to the awful, saccharine, empty crap that got heavy rotation on MTV during the middle and latter third of that decade: Irene Cara, Def Leppard, Gloria Estefan and the Miami Sound Sensation, Kenny Loggins, Phil Collins, etc. It's stuff that was considered bad music even then, stuff that I rebelled against throughout junior high and high school, and it's bringing back nightmare visions of sad suburban teenage keg parties where the Top Gun soundtrack and Bob Dylan's "Everyone Must Get Stoned" were considered the twin heights of musical innovation EVAR. If it weren't for my friendly iPod, chock full of my own speical blend of sonic therapy, I might grab the knitting needles from the guy sitting next to me (no SF hipster cafe today is complete without at least one smug beardy guy knitting a hat or scarf, it seems, though this trend may be on its way out) and plunge them through my eardrums. Ugh. Okay, grumpy old guy rant is over. Usually they play pretty good stuff, which is why I'm mouthing off. gimme a holla | 19 hollas heard Sun 19 February 2006
don't need no hateration, holleration for our electricity  That's the message I hear in Matthew Herbert's percolating remix of Roy Ayers' "Touch of Class," though unquestionably and understandably your results may differ. But I think few would deny the assertion that it is one of the more interesting and successful experiments to be found on Virgin Ubiquity Remixed, in which a number of tracks from Virgin Ubiquity: Unreleased Recordings 1976-1981 and Virgin Ubiquity II: Unreleased Recordings 1976-1981 are revamped, revised, stirred, blended, diced, chopped, folded, spindled, and (some will surely say) even mutilated to varying effect across the space of two discs. I won't say it isn't an uneven compilation--the entirely successful remix comp is a very rare animal indeed, and the longer these compilations get, the more chance there seems to be that trash has found a way onboard. But when the remixes do shine, they shine brightly. Herbert's effort is definitely one of the brighter tracks, and I think folks will also find Ame's tech house mix of "Tarzan", Sir Piers soulful version of "Brand New Feeling," and Pepe Bradock's wonderful deep house take on "I Am Your Mind, Part II" to be especially enlightening. [Buy it at Amazon] Azymuth calls their jazzy, funky, sambadelic sound "Samba Doido," or "Crazy Samba," and it's perfectly represented by both the original and Spirtual Southalized versions of the "Roda Piao." The original track appeared on the 2004 album Brazilian Soul, and you'll be able to find this remix both in 12" format and on a bonus CD of Azymuth remixes that will be included with Pure (The Far Out Years 1995-2006), a "best of" comp covering Azymuth's releases on Far Out Recordings. [Get Pure directly from Far Out (UK), or preorder the 12" from Timewarp Distribution (UK)] Of course, you clever mp3 blog trainspotter types know that The Diva Mixtape was already chatted up by both my friends at Music Fer Robots and that lovely Grilla Vs Bear site a week or two back. But we live in a humongously big world, and I reckon it's going to take a lot of promotion for this track to really effect a change, world-peace-wise. So, for those of you who missed the this incoming call the first couple times around: here you go. Now venture forth, spread the beat, and let a thousand flowers of peace bloom! [The Audio Dregs label is offering The Divas Mixtape with every purchase of Mobius Beard, Copy's full length CD of original songs (it's not named after this blog, far as I know). Not a bad deal for something that could potentially end war as we know it. Get it here.] So these are passing strange days for your intrepid host: a week ago Thursday I was laid off from my software job of the past four years. Yeah, a tragedy, kinda, but then again it's also par for the course in that industry, especially when you're a tech writer working for a company that's been aggressively outsourcing tech writing jobs to India for a few years now. Bummer, dude! But then again, maybe not. The economy's strangely perky in the local tech sector, and it looks like there's actually a lot of work in my specialty to be had in these parts. So with any luck I'll be back in the saddle again before too long. And to be honest, I really needed to move on from that last place anyway. (If you happen to have an opening for a tech writer with 10 years of experience in the ERP industry that can write both end-user and developer-level doc, preferably in the SF Bay Area...don't be a stranger, get in touch.) And in the meantime, I'm going to take a few moments to get some stuff done and enjoy life a bit. Part of that involves working a bit more on this blog, maybe even getting a few rapid-fire entries out before my next legitimate workday. I spent a lot of time this week wandering 'round my city, doing something that I've not had much time for over the past few months: taking pictures of street art ephemera. Some pretty amazing graff went up around town while I was distracted by other things (like working through weekends, ha) and now I'm busy trying to capture pics of the best of it before it all gets buffed or written over. So far I've managed to track down some amazing stuff; the shot gracing this entry is just one example of the kind of things I've turned up. More to come! I'm also going to try to spread my freelance writing wings a bit, so if any of you magazine editors out there are looking for someone to cover a piece or two for your zine, drop me a line. I'm good for reviews, essays, articles, whichever. Time to try to do all the sorts of things I used to complain that I never had time to do, eh? And that's enough about my tragicomic life. Let's talk about Henry Rollins' tragicomic life instead. Have you heard about what's gone down with him in Australia? Apparently he just got put on some sort of terrorist watchlist over there. Why might that be? Well, it's simple, really: Someone apparently objected to his choice of in-flight reading material. Cripes. Next thing you know I'll find out the NSA is tapping my phone because I have Lawrence of Arabia in my Netflix queue. gimme a holla | 12 hollas heard Mon 6 February 2006
the handsome devils of alpha centauri  In any case I don't really know what to say about a song that includes timeless lyrics like From beginner to advanced / Drop your hangups, drop your pants / It's all release and relaxation / With no weird breakfast conversation and Tri-bi-metro-omnisexual / homo, hetero, yo, I'm flexible / horizontal, in a pile / doggy dragon lotus style...except that it sounds like it should be the collective theme song of of the events typically featured on Last Night's Party. [This song is from Dial 0, My Robot Friend's upcoming release. The first single from that release is the cover of "23 Minutes In Brussels," which will feature a remix by Tommy Sunshine. Check with Scotland's Soma Records for more info in the days to come.] *My Robot Friend's press packet claims that My Robot Friend is in fact "a robosexual who neither desires, nor is capable of having sex with human beings." But that just sounds like a clever line to me. Yeah, I promised some sort of cogent political content for this entry, but as of late thinking about writing political screeds has been a lot easier for me than actually writing them. And half the time all I get is grief in return. But I will say I've been listening to the NSA hearings off and on today, and as far as I can tell, the Democratic side of the panel sounds like they're really giving Gonzales (and by extension, the Bush Administration) hell without making many embarrassing missteps, which is great. (Check out Senator Leahy's opening statement this morning--it's marvelous.) And the liveblogging going on at Glenn Greenwald's Unclaimed Territory and Corrente has been great. (See Greenwald--a brilliant constitutional law attorney--take on a crazy-ass C-SPAN caller here. His point: this is not a Democrats vs. Republicans, Liberals vs. Conservatives debate...this is about core American values being disregarded.) ( click for the rest of this *very exciting* screedlet ) gimme a holla | 5 hollas heard Fri 27 January 2006
heaven is a place where nothing ever happens  Ugh. A month's absence. Nobody's more horrified than me about it, let me assure you. But I won't bore everyone with the usual excuses (because they are the usual excuses: dayjob, family obligations, other writing work, etc. etc.). So let's get on with it, shall we? And it's true that the track does sound like a cruel joke in its first few moments--that snarkily heliumized loop of the chorus at the start just grates on the ears in all the wrong ways--but when the mix shifts into high gear about a minute in, there's absolutely no denying that this thing is 200% fan-fucking-tabulus. You can't listen to it without imagining a room of late-nite revelers going stark raving mad at the breakdown, screaming, waving hands wildly in the air, smearing their mascara all over the walls in a frenzied orgy of electropunk'd musical abandonment. It's the sort of amped-up sound that has you spontaneously hollering "hells yea!" into the sky and plugging into that mean 'n' vengeful dancegroove that that can only spawn from the bitter end of romance. [buy it used on CD from Amazon UK (maybe) or rare bootleg whitelabel one-sided vinyl.] |