if there has been one name that's stuck for me recently, out of all the radio rips and whatnot i've been running thru, it's oneman. this guy has consistently thrown down spontaneous, diverse, hype sets that mix up the old and the new without sounding scattered or all over the place. Serving up a gang of old school garage, funky, grime, dubstep and PURPLE, his sets seldom disappoint. If like me, you're just getting wind of this guy, there is a bunch of material for you to get through:
been knocking these for a minute, but I just got around to cutting them up. three guest mixes on mary anne hobbes' experimental show, from a few weeks back.
Grab the first radio appearance from Wiley in over a year. Lots of new bars, lots of jokes and vibes on the set. JJ on decks. Wiley is obviously not shy about trying new lyrics and flopping them on the air, which makes for some interesting sequences.. where you get to hear the same piece reloaded 3 times in succession, getting tighter each time, slightly different sound and flow.
Just got a hold of this quasi-new set from Appleblim and Wedge, recorded on sub fm. I hadn't heard of Wedge before, but am feeling his production, more of this post-dilla, slowish dubstep kind of thing that keeps popping up. It's a little reminiscent of darkstar. Nice to hear radio sets where the djs are blatantly having a laugh in the studio... Vibes!!
Oh man, I am feeling this Vegas tune.. Vegas is quick to draw for the uplifting, brush-your-teeth-and-eat-your-vegetables, sparkle dust in the production, live-up-clean kind of choruses. But sometimes they switch to some raw, straight-ahead business after the drop, like whoa, what happened! Kind of like this one, actually:
mr vegas fr overmars - raging bull
Actually Ele is kind of the originator of the unrelated positivity chorus paired with disco-inferno bars.. Remember this one?
Danny Scrilla is either a part of or affiliated in some way with the riseandshine camp, I can't remember. They got on my radar from making three really solid mixes of uk funky. Here's a remix he's done of major lazer's hold the line.
I found this culture mix posted up on the massive b site, where I was half-heartedly looking for some events popping off last night. It seemed like saturday was the off-night between some mega arena jams at bb kings on friday and later tonight, so I was a little thrown to see bounty + beenie together on the marquee at Roseland - whoops! It was not to be though, I had a date with the russian vodka room which was kind of cool in its own way, and the line looked a little out of hand anyhow.
late on this but after listening to chief boima on mudd up a few weeks back, i decided to pull his mix for fader back out of the vaults. it's big, it's big. the tracklist says it all really.
1.Black Nature, vocal intro (homie of mine that's in the Sierra Leone Refugee All Stars) 2. Abdul Tee-Jay, “Ka-Bubu No.1” (Sierra Leonean [in London I Think] bubu music) 3. Chi Boogie, “Move Back” (Chicago juke) 4. Janka Nabay, “Ah Gboleah” (Sierra Leone bubu) 5. Boca Chica y El Presidente, Boca3 (Unknown name and artist, from Boca Chica in Dominican Republic. Boca Chica is a city with a popular beach and DJs sell mixtapes on the beach. These guys were Haitian descendants.. This was from a mixtape by selectas Boca Chica y El Presidente) 6. Ghislain Poirier, “Karnival” (Montreal...electro-soca?) 7. DJ Black, “Los Locos Somos Mas” (Panama... Haitian influenced reggae soca) 8. Silver Star, “Va Canon” (Honduras punta) 9. Sierra Leone's Refugee Allstars, “Ya N'Digba” (Sierra Leone [Not sure the style, but traditional from the villages]) 10. Joe y Kello, “Mambo Gaga-Gaga” (Dominican Republic gaga) 11. Zion I, “Geek to the Beat” (Bay Area rap) 12. Didacia, “Misseru” (Mozambique marrabenta) 13. Dj Terrivel, “Danca So” (Angola tarraxa kuBass) 14. Unknown, “Micola” (Angola kuduro) 15. DJ Click, “Bloque Brandy” (Ivory Coast coupe decale) 16. Eedris Abdulkareem, “2 Legs Up” (Nigeria rap) 17. Akon, “Right Now (Na Na Na)” Chief Boima Remix (Sierra Leone, Senegal, Jersey, Oakland, Milwaukee, Atlanta mbalax decale)
also, the chief is one half of bannana clipz. not really sure who the other half is, but they've done a lot.. check them out on myspace.
I first heard this tune on joy's mix on low end spasm, but it seems like it's popping up everywhere now. hypnotic shuffling broken, heavyweight... this has gotta be stiff on a real soundsystem.
Oh man. You almost shouldn't be allowed to promote anything which has the word swagger in it at this point, but when these guys do it, it is somehow okay. I am not even sure how this song got on my radar, it just appeared in capture scratch, I am gonna say wayneandwax?
There was a period.. '1999 maybe? whenever A S.W.A.T Healing Ritual came out, when i was really into witchdoctor. matt shadetek knows what i'm talking about!
Mostly i'm into how random this video feels, and how it all seems to be shot in various parking lots.. is he saying 'rich people call twelve', like 911?
It feels like I have been listening to more london radio sets and mixes than at any other point in recent memory - its hard to keep up. Every day brings an avalanche of new tunes to retrieve, load up and listen to. One look at the rinse playback feed shows that this funky 4x4 thing has completely taken over and whatever you may feel about this latest phase, (or which theory you employ to make sense of it all) it does seems futile to try to pretend it isn't here to stay. Or, to put it another way, you might as well know about it.
Cooly G - FACT mix Cooly is a new hyperdub signee who produces and sings. This mix is wicked.
LVIS1990 - UK house mix for Curb Crawlers This mix supposedly focuses on the less nursery rhyme / skank side of things. If you find this distinction confusing, check out what Blackdown has to say about it here. Lvis says to file this under uk house, not funky. Either way the set is a big one.
Blackdown and Dusk - live on rinse Droppin' the NUMM! some heavy throwback stuff at the front, and a short mix of zomby specials in the middle.. Check it out.
Been getting into this fellow Alexander Nut a lot recently, his sets seem to be all about tracing the connections between dusty madlib/dilla style production and the kind of music that joker and zomby make.
I don't know, I might be just about officially hitting my auto-tune threshold, but this is still fire.. Kartel on syrupppy slow reminiscence tip, oddly creepy like many of his girl tunes. Makes you wonder if any of this material will see the light of day past myspace/youtube etc.. There's been like, two albums from the teacher on greensleeves since 2003.. How is that even possible!
This mix is from 2000 or so, and I grabbed it from some now-defunct sound clash aggregator site, and then it was on my hard drive in unsharable realaudio format, and then the hard drive bought it, and then I got it back from a friend around a year ago, and then I ripped it to mp3 so here it is. King Addies to the world.
Like so many live sets, the running commentary, exaltations and chatting over the top have become fused with the mix in my memory, so much so that when listening to these tunes in different contexts, they sound naked, like something is missing.
Not positive, but i think you can hear a pre-superstar tony matterhorn towards the end. Most of these tracks are put down in artist segments so a big chunk of junior reid dubs will be followed by a big chunk of michael rose. Good stuff.
Still reeling from the heavy bass explosion that was tropical dance 3, I finally got a second to listen to the second collabo mix from simon + awesome tapes from africa. It's pretty bananas so far, not exactly on a hit you over the head kick, just in a slow burn, this is is gonna be on repeat forever kind of way. Perfect for shaking out the cobwebs and easing into the day.
If you missed part one, you will surely want to grab it now. I have had a chopped version sitting around for a while, but I haven't gotten around to uploading it, so drop me a line if that's your thing. Otherwise, the single-track version is below.
I am into this. Grevious Angel, big man in the scene, heavy with meticulous mp3 metadata + tracklists, has put together a new uk funky/whatdoyoucallit compilation. Instead of trying to hunt down the crucual tunes, which must be quite a challenge, GA has spliced together bunch of radio sets, and the result is BIG.
This is not a mix. Rather, this is a compilation of the best UK Funky I could find, taken from radio shows. I’m NOT pretending I have these tunes. Rather, I’m showcasing the best in UK Funky. Because, while funky is wonderful, there’s a lot of tunes out there I don’t like that much, and I wanted an hour of music I could point that would say, “this is what I want. This is what I want to make.”
There's a bunch of old bangers on this Best of Rapid comp from Dj Furious, nice blends and sequencing too. I never get tired of Ruff Squad, they have such a distinct sound, and their production always stood out, easily among the best in Grime. It was kind of like they were trying to flip that '03 Dipset/Heatmakers sound, but without samples.
I was admittedly not blown away by the new So Special video, what with the random 'in the club' scenes and the weak computer graphic sequences, but I was still bummed to hear that BET canceled its premiere on 106th and Park at the last second. If nothing else the video seemed to be a clear-cut bid to fit in smoothly with the jeezy/t-wayne/omarion-clone chart toppers of the moment. Looks like the reasons for the pull had nothing to do with homophobic lyrics or guntalk - just some scantily clad women and gratuitous alcohol shots.. Come on now BET, fair is fair.. I've seen some way more scandalous hiphop videos than this one in the after-school rotation. Hopefully this will just be a little speed-bump for the gully god, and will keep the hype up for a promising first-quarter release. (Your first chance to cop this track legitimately, almost a year after it started floating around youtube, a primo example of how screwed up/outdated the music retail model is, at least with respect to reggae..)
SURVEY - WHAT PATH WILL MAVADO TAKE IN HIS JOURNEY TO MAINSTREAM SUCCESS? a) Sign w/ Puff and make exercise dvds, then vanish. b) Sign w' Dame Dash, move to New York, and cease all output instantly. c) Do a bunch of watered down rap collabos with miscellaneous hip-hoppers, who will inevitably draw for dubious patoi flows - tony yayo anyone? d) None of the above. e) All of the above, with new sneaker deals.
If this is getting you down, here are some old videos that got the lets-reshoot-this-and-make-it-commercially-viable treatment.. Wish I could find the BCAT version of ele's joint, all I can remember is they were standing on some school desks in actual water and it was pretty rad.
Elephant Man - Pon The River
Sean Paul - We'll Be Burning
And here is the proper gullyside one for Last Night:
Eddie Stats has profiled the Truck Back Crew in his latest Ghetto Palms installment. It turns out TB get the name from the location of their studio, inside an actual, physical truck in the back of a lot. There has been a lot of noise around Truck Back stemming from Erup's massive 'click my finger' from last year, and it looks like that was the first joint they put out. It's heavy and all, but it was when I heard the next TruckBack/Erup collabo that I started to really feel this camp. Just a deeper vibe from EtotheR on this one.
All I've known about Filastine for the last few is that some of his tracks found their way into /Rupture's latest buyable mix*, which is as good an introduction as any I guess. It turns out Filastine has started a pretty excellent travel blog while touring Aisia. Lots of wild photos and youtube clips over there, documenting everything from his ad-hoc hotel room studio setups to encounters with renegade Vespa conventions in Bali. Can't forget the ubiquitous 'I was shaken down by shady officials at the borderline' story.. Nice.
* Which was recorded in August 07, and languished in LABEL HELL till a few months ago.. Out to all my dot com millionaires stop starting labels if you are not going to release things in a timely manner you wastemen.
What can you say? A gang of william chops, pulled from rinse and what sounds like some live PAs. They are even kind of beatmatched, or at least they come in on the one, with a lot of thought behind the selection. This is infinitely more hype than any major label release could ever be.
Here are some interviews with Kartel and Mavado about their impressions of who won the Sting clash.. A whole heap of controversy over this one, with each side claiming there was some shadiness behind the concert setup, bias in print media etc.. Whatever the motivation was, it clearly doesn't help the Gully God's cause to have left the stage in the middle of the clash, even if he did run back in. Kartel was left with 'nuff ammo after: "Nike has a new sneaker coming out, called gully nike / Sure, he would have won if it was a running clash, but it was a singing clash" etc.
Recently, I came across Maga Bo's interview/day-in-the-life-of microdocumentary of DJ /rupture on youtube. I was instantly reminded of some old footage of DropTheLime I had seen over a year ago. DTL, probably already pretty much the man as far as all things bassy in nyc at this point, but not yet a full on mega star, comes across as totally humble and down to earth, as he has been in all my real life dealings with the man.. This is most evident when he speaks about starting out trying to mix on American DJ™ belt drive decks, and his producer origins being a blatant attempt to emulate 90s techno band Underworld.
But what I found the most interesting about the DTL interview was the more tangential stuff like an old job he had working in the back of a video dubbing house (spoiler alert: it sucked), or what he thought about music blogs in early 2007 ("There's already too many.. but let's start one more anyway") and what was cool about life in nyc... Which brings us to /Rupture, as it was in watching the Maga Bo piece that I got all flashbacky, particularly when he started running down the good and bad of life in nyc... It seemed to me like the outernational big homey hit a lot of the same points as DTL, a tribeca native.
"an insane hive of activity, with little to no quality of life"
the cultural density
commercial rap djs at night
There's also some cool bits in there about the glacial rate at which the record biz moves, and on time and lateness being the gift + the curse of a dj. I would have to add that /Rupture was definitely keeping it real about that one, the first time I met him he came over to my basement to meet up with shadetek and play some tunes, and he was on some severe, euro-style lateness.
I was alerted to this new mix by Joker aka MR TIME TO RESTART aka 2000 and PURPLE by a myspace feed of all things.. See.. new music! The internet totally works!
Hugo Massien interview
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Hugo Massien's "Remnants / London Underground 2014 - 16" EP is out now:
hear it on Spotify or buy vinyl & digital ----- Blackdown: So I think the
very natu...
The return of...
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It's been a long time coming. Sorry about the lack of action on here. It is
mostly due to time constraints, laziness and moving to Bristol. I have been
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Dutty Artz is dead, long live Dutty Artz!
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In 2008, after DJ /rupture and Matt Shadetek had both returned to the US
from Europe to settle in New York, they joined forces to start a record
label and ...
UPROOT! Rupture wrote a book
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Finished copies of my book have arrived! Uproot: Travels in 21st-Century
Music and Digital Culture will be published on August 16 by Farrar, Straus
and Gir...
Wave Count
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MIT’s Stefan Helmreich and I have collaborated on a mega-mix of music that
evokes or otherwise represents ocean waves. Building on Stefan’s
anthropological...
