My album The Empire Never Ended is finally out. The weight of waiting has lifted! Â Waiting to release things drives me crazy so I am super super happy to be able to finally share this music with you. Â I put a ton of time and effort into this record and I feel like it’s some of the better stuff I’ve done, sonically, song writing wise and in the way it all fits together. Â I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.
On the Valentines Day before the release of Matt Shadetek’s new album The Empire Never Ended on March 26th, the Brooklyn producer has assembled a gift for his fans containing a previously unheard mix and alternate versions which re-imagine his 2010 project Flowers as hazy baby-making music for paranoid shut-ins. Dragging Flowers to a halftime crawl Shadetek connects the dots between the bouncing effervescence of Flowers and the heavier, darker tone of Empire. In addition to the mix the Purple Flowers EP features remixes from Dubbel Dutch, Lamin Fofana & Shiftee. The Empire Never Ended is released March 26th on Dutty Artz.
Grab the project for free over at the Dutty Artz Bandcamp.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkxLXbBLZU8&[/youtube]
This is pretty incredible. Â Shows what you can do nowadays with some creativity and relatively low budget and technology film making wise. Â If you are interested in uses for drones besides killing people this is a really good one. It’s a Czech skate video shot with a flying camera. I’d like to remix it with different music but the visuals are pretty stunning. Big up to the people who made this.
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/55094977[/vimeo]
Big shout out to Jahdan Blakkamoore writing and singing the chorus on this new Snoop Lion joint.
via Prefix mag
“The latest Snoop Lion track featuring Mavado and Popcaan might be his best yet since replacing the Dogg moniker. The song is one of the genre bending tracks that have become prevelant in 2012 and it’s held together by excellent production from Dre Skull and Major Lazer. We guarantee you’ll be singing the chorus by the end of the five minute track. “Put your lighters up / Get high with me / Fly me / Ain’t no dividing us.”
“Lighters Up” will be officially released on Dec. 18.”
I’ve been keeping this under my hat for a while so it’s a great pleasure to finally announce the first single for my new album: La Vida Loca feat. Troy Ave. It’s quite a departure from stuff of the last stuff you may have heard me do, I’ve been returning to my hiphop roots and incorporating some of the crazy southern rap sounds that are in the air. I linked up with Troy Ave to do this after hearing him on Mr. Motherfuckin Exquire’s mixtape and being impressed by his flow and panache. I’m really happy with how the song came out and hope you will enjoy it too.
This is the instrumental for my contribution to Le1f’s mixtape Dark York earlier this year. A few people were asking me for it and so I thought I’d make it available. Â It’s 128bpm so a bit slower than a lot of the ‘trap’ music popping on the net right now. Â My homie Dead O from clouds gave me a huge stack of underground Memphis rap CDs several years ago when I played in Helsinki with him and the hypnotic darkness really made an impact. Â This is my love letter to those beats. Â A big shoutout to Le1f for using it for his tape, as a lifelong New York Rap Guy I’m happy to be included in this new generation of weird rap that’s oozing out of NY right now. Â I’m calling the genre for this one Emotional Grease.
Members of the Dutty Artz tribe are long familiar with Jahdan Blakkamoore through his work with myself and DJ /Rupture over the years. Â For his new single World Keeps Spinning he’s teamed up with new Manhattan based producer Robzilla, making his production debut. Â I’d been hearing Rob’s music for a minute and when he asked me to introduce him to Jahdan I thought that they would sound great together. The results are here, including a remix by yours truly and one from London funky sensation Footsteps. Â You can get the release on iTunes and where all fine digital music is sold.
Last week me and Atropolis played at the launch party for the new Dub Stuy record label and their home built reggae sound system. Â Playing on this system was really really fun. Â Physical sound vibrations, great bass and a great vibe. Big shoutout to the Dub Stuy team for having the vision to put this together. Â We need more people thinking big like this in our underground scene in Brooklyn.
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/51964571[/vimeo]
I’ve really been enjoying the stuff that Dre Skull has been doing on his Mixpak label. He’s been covering a ton of the musical styles I enjoy including Dancehall, House and other forms of interesting beat music. We caught up when we played together at the Brooklyn Electronic Music Festival and he mentioned that he was doing a compilation of southern inspired hiphop beats by electronic producers. It turns out that that’s what I’d been working on as well and so I offered to contribute something. I’m really happy with how the comp has come out, there are some great contributions from the other producers and I’m happy to be a part of it. Here’s my track The Machines which I just added to my soundcloud. Below is a link to a playlist on the Mixpak Soundcloud with all the tracks available to stream. The compilation will be available on iTunes and all other fine digital retailers on September 25th, 2012.
Raz Mesinai is a longtime homie of the Dutty Artz crew and is one of those crazy, iconoclastic and stubbornly original musicians that defy easy classification. He’s been making spacy, sometimes terrifying, blunted bass music since before your mom ever started listening to Dubstep. He posted this piece on his Tumblr the other day and I got a real kick out of it and thought I’d share it here.
MY WORK by Raz Mesinai
My work cleans up after itself as well as after the messes I make.
My work doesn’t want to be ‘current’, because that would mean that eventually it wouldn’t be.
My work picks up chicks for me, and then forces me to break up with them.
My work is not casual, nor is it relaxed.
These guys Flatbush Zombies are dope. They kinda remind me of The Pharcyde meets The Gravediggaz but rapping about taking acid and yelling ‘Brains!’ a lot. Â It’s pretty great. Â I’m happy to hear the diversity of new talent popping up in NYC and especially in Brooklyn. You can download their recent mixtape DRUGS here or watch the video for their breakout single ‘Thug Waffle’ below. Â I like the production on it a lot and something I like about them as a crew in general is that they have a producer in their group (Erick Arc Elliot) who makes most of the beats so it’s got a nice unified sound. Â Nowadays everyone is so mercenary about beats things can get a little all over the place so this is a refreshing old school ‘2 MCs and a DJ’ sorta vibe. Â I’m generally excited about hiphop again lately, which is weird after many many years of feeling kinda comatose about it all.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=do9VLONS86Y[/youtube]
Ever wonder why our records sound good? It’s because of a guy called Shawn Hatfield out in the Bay Area. Â I first met Shawn years ago on the internet when I used to hang out on IRC in a chatroom with a bunch of other producers called #// (slash slash). He used to teach me crazy music science in MAX/MSP over a chat window just because he was a nice guy. Â We kept in touch and when he opened his mastering business we started working together. He’s mastered my albums Flowers and Solar Life Raft as well as most Dutty Artz stuff in the past few years. He does a great job and is just a generally cool guy. Â Recently he sent me an email with a link to an online fundraiser he is doing to help his father Jay Hatfield who is battling cancer. Â If you are like me and most of the people I know and don’t have a square nine to five or work for the government you know how fucked up the health care system in this country is and how expensive it can be. Â It’s not fair that someone should have to go through an incredibly draining battle fighting a disease and then have to go bankrupt afterwards to pay for their treatment.
Shawn has set up an online fundraising page to raise funds for his father’s treatment here. Â He’s also a badass mastering engineer who you can hire to make your music sound awesome here. Â In choosing to be musicians and work in this business we give up a lot of the stability and safety that people take for granted in normal life, things like health insurance. If you can relate maybe chip in a few bucks or hire Shawn to master some of your music.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGm9o37BNjM[/youtube]
Right now a lot of people are throwing the word ‘trap’ around to describe the hiphop coming out of Atlanta and the south. The dark bass heavy music pioneered by producers like Lex Luger, Southside and Sunny Digital has been dominant in the hiphop world for a while but has been catching on among the people who are fleeing Dubstep’s sinking ship of un-coolness. In the midst of this it’s worth thinking about where the term came from: drug dealing. I just watched “Snow On The Bluff” last night on Netflix streaming and it does for drug dealing and robbing dealers what Blair Witch did for hunting for witches in the woods. Gritty, low fi handheld camera work follows around anti-hero Curtis Snow as he robs dealers, goes in and out of jail and tries to take care of his toddler son. It’s a crazy look at daily life in the streets of Atlanta and at times is really hard to watch. There are a lot of moments where you are left thinking that what you are watching is real or thinly veiled reality. These people are not actors and the star is a self proclaimed stick up kid and drug dealer. That’s his real son in the movie. Â Unlike some of these gangster movies where they spend 80 minutes glamorizing that life and then 10 minutes moralizing at the end when the hero gets killed this is pretty much raw from start to finish. Â There’s not a lot of happy shit in this movie and for that it seems like a more realistic portrayal of this life than we usually see. Â If you’re interested in a look at the dark side of the trap mythology that everyone is selling you should check this out.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbW7c0kSa9I&feature=player_embedded#![/youtube]
Gucci Mane – Supa Cocky (Video)
Really been jamming to this new Gucci Mane mixtape “I’m Up”. Hard trap beats and Gucci’s woozily charismatic flow are soundtracking my summer. Young Chop who produced Chief Keef’s “Don’t Like” produced the above video which captures the hazy drugged up vibe pretty well. The whole tape is dope, get it free below.
