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.

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[youtube width=”525″ height=”360″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESj164wKc6I[/youtube]

Super excited about this new event, BomBeat, that I am launching with my crew Cumba Mela, and Nickodemus from Turntables on the Hudson.  Its all going down this Saturday, November 24th at Le Poisson Rouge, in Manhattan. Expect to hear a wide range of global bass music: cumbia, dancehall, kuduro, house, moombahton, reggaeton….

We have Jeremy Sole coming from LA, repping KCRW, TheLift, and Afro Funke.

We are going to try our best to get a free EP for ever event. Be sure to check out the first one bellow!

BomBeat EP1 November 24, 2012 @ LPR NYC by BomBeat

le1f dark york artwork

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.  It’s 128bpm so a bit slower than a lot of the ‘trap’ music popping on the net right now.  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.  This is my love letter to those beats.  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.  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.  For his new single World Keeps Spinning he’s teamed up with new Manhattan based producer Robzilla, making his production debut.  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.  You can get the release on iTunes and where all fine digital music is sold.

 

 

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.

 


Stream the full compilation here.

[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.  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.  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.  If you’re interested in a look at the dark side of the trap mythology that everyone is selling you should check this out.

snow on the bluff poster

liberace fur coat
[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.