I download a lot of music. So not all of it gets the listening attention it deserves, at least not immediately. But a select few of this past week's acquisitions managed to catch my ear, so here they are. Mostly chill/trip/downtempo electronica. Might try to make this "random batch" format a regular (weekly?) thing.
Man, do I love Gold Panda. He consistently puts out the most gorgeous, lush, beautiful productions. I've been listening to his album Lucky Shiner a lot lately. Peaking Lights throw in some reverb-washed vocals and dubbed-out experimental vibes on this stellar remix.
Chrome Sparks is the drummer for Stepdad, one of the most exciting synthpop acts around nowadays. He's also in the business of producing delicate, intricate electronic pop musics. Go grab his My <3 EP for FREE (though you can pay if you'd like), you won't regret it.
D33J posted this to his facebook on a while back. Shameless boner jam, but it's got that tripped-out sex-in-space kind of vibe, which we here at CC are kind of into.
Unbeknownst to most of y'all, I occasionally try my hand at making music. Mostly psychedelic ambient stuff for the time being, but I'm working on more beat-oriented things nowadays (even the occasional trip-pop track). Give me a Listen / Like / Follow if you dig!
~ ~ ~ ADDENDUM TO THE BONUS ~ ~ ~ One of our favorite producers, Asura, just did an XLR8R podcast. You have no excuses.
Hello out there! Here i am, floating back from the depths of space to make my return to the blog. I've missed you, and i've been listening to lotsa thangs. Heres a dump of tracks for.. well.. listening. Look for the zip, and a special video gift at the end...
Session Cats - Flying Lotus From the 2006 demo tape, super hip-hoppy and dilla-y (?). Comin out of nowhere, FlyLo
Party Animal - Hudson Mohawke NEW HUDSON MOHAWKE. HudMo gives Gucci Mane a whole new context with this lovely little party starter. This is from Pleasure Principle, a limited vinyl-only release with a handful of pop remixes. If you can get your hands on it, I highly suggest you do.
Latenight - TOKiMONSTA From Bedtime Lullabies, came out in 2008. If you can tell me in the comments which more recent song samples this one, i'll give you a prize....
Safari Disco Club - Yelle You gotta love the intro to this song... and the whole song. Even though i can't quite understand what Yelle is saying (read: its in french), i'm taken away by the synth dance pop.
Hairy Candy - Tobacco Tobacco is one member of Black Moth Super Rainbow, an all-analog psychedelic group. They remind me a little of the rolling stones, but even more synths... glorious
Cruel - St. Vincent On a different note - some new St. Vincent. If you don't know St. Vincent, you should definitely check her out - there is some beautiful musicmaking going on here.
So the Hit + Run Crew are a screenprinting and art outfit that fuck with all the trippy electronic/hip-hop/beat shit we love so dearly (we have 84 posts tagged with that label so far...swag), and they put on a SWEET show at the Echoplex last week. They did free, live screenprinting in the venue:
their mobile screenprinting setup: multiple screens on a rotating base. photocredit patkins
and we showed up early enough for free t-shirts and Jonwayne (!!!) mixes. Patkins and I (as well as our friend Azad, the Dr. Gonzo to our Hunter S. Thompson) were in attendance. Here's my recap of the night, with relevant tracks interspersed throughout. The night opened up with the Dirty Bandits. They were solid, and a welcome surprise given their status as a drums-bass-guitar-vox band at a show full of laptop artists. Go check out their facebook, they've posted some tunes there. I may do more research on them, they were quite good.
After them came none other than the savior of my weeknights from 8p-10p P.S.T., KCRW's own Garth Trinidad. He had some technical difficulties at first (he was going all vinyl, though, so we forgive him), but once he got going he played a set of really interesting, eclectic house tracks, followed by a solid hip-hop set, which the crowd really got into (he even played Wu-Tang). He's probably one of the most influential music promoters in my life, as he provided my homework soundtrack for the entirety of senior year, and if you're ever listening to the radio late at night, during his show or not, tune into KCRW. Their late-night DJ's play really awesome shit, stuff you never hear on radio. Then after his set, they announced that Blu, arguably one of the bigger names on the bill (and the explanation for why this was such a die-hard hip-hop crowd) would not be showing up. The crowd was visibly displeased, but most of them stuck around as far as I could tell. Though the next act was hardly straight-forward hip-hop...Mono/Poly makes some fucked up shit. He has a very FlyLo-esque blend of trip-hop, dubstep, and jazz elements in his work, resulting in these incredibly trippy, heavy productions that boggle and delight. He's actually on FlyLo's label, Brainfeeder, and you should get his recent EP, Manifestations, HERE. One of my favorite joints of the year so far, from one of the scene's most underrated producers (imo).
Glow - Mono/Poly [removed] Then, again shifting the focus from laptops and mixers to good old-fashioned instruments, Sun Araw played a set of hypnotic, layered, noise-drenched psychedelia. It was a bit loud for patkins, Azad, and much of the crowd, but I got really into it (it helped that I had been making psychedelic noise music with a friend lately, so I was sort of already in the mindset). Go check them out, I really dug them and will DEFINITELY be researching them, probably with a post in mind.
(( a collab track with Matthewdavid, who DESTROYED Low End Theory last night. This one's a bit more improvised and freeform than the stuff they played at the Echoplex, but it's still quite reminiscent of their sound...and TRIPPY ))
Suddenly we switched technology AGAIN, this time to Jonwayne and his mighty little SP-404. He took that little metal box and brought the fucking house down, launching bomb after bomb at us from his arsenal of neck-snapping, heavy, swagger-up-the-wazoo beats. This being my second time seeing him, I can now safely say he's one of my favorite beat scene artists to see live, he just destroyed the crowd and had the MOST ridiculous energy. He dropped a mixture of his own absurdly awesome productions, and even FREESTYLED (see photo below).
(( from More Throwaways, which you can get for free HERE. One of the weirdest beats I've ever heard, but it DESTROYS on a proper system ))
the man freestyles. photocredit patkins
Anyways, Jonwayne is the shit. Get Bowser now from Alpha Pup, you will NOT regret that purchase.
Then another guy had volunteered to take Blu's spot, but we decided to dip. Also missed Elos, unfortunately, but we'd already had quite the night. One of the more eclectic shows I've been to, and I had a complete and utter blast at it. Really awesome music, solid crowd, plus I got a badass T-shirt and mix CD (by Jonwayne himself, which you can buy HERE if you'd like to just get the distilled atmosphere of this concert in one mix).
Support Hit + Run HERE, or by liking them on Facebook! I certainly did, after that tight of a show. Keep yr eyes open, they do shit around LA all the time.
Of Animal Collective fame. Great solo stuff, from his record Tomboy, which came out recently and has since been in wide circulation (HINT). Psychedelic indie pop goodness.
Holy shit. Toro y Moi remixing Odd Future. Did NOT see that coming. Still, awesome track, good to see that Chaz Bundwick still uses a computer. Though this is (unsurprisingly) WAY darker than his earlier stuff. Check out Toro y Moi's new, slightly-more-acoustic album, Underneath The Pine. And check out Tyler's new video and single HERE. Original track and video HERE.
Old school. It's kinda like post-punk-pop.......ah, fuck it. It's 80's, it rocks, and the refrain is "I might like you better if we slept together." It's awesome.
This is my jam. Really neat lo-fi indie-pop, with some epic fuckin syncopations. I intend to seek out more Darwin Deez, as should you. He has a self-titled album, which I will procure when I have the mean$ to do so, but for now grab this free live session he did for Daytrotter.
BONUS MUSIC VIDEO: Erykah Badu - Gone Baby Don't Be Long
Shit's been stuck in my head for like a month. :D Awesome video by Flying Lotus and Bleeple, who fucking rocks. Check him out.
You may not have heard of him, but The-Dream is one of the most prolific Top 40/pop songwriters of the past five years (e.g. "Single Ladies," "Umbrella," "Touch My Body," "Baby"). He's also done some solo stuff, most of which tends towards the absurd (e.g. "Falsetto," in which he boasts that his sexual prowess causes an instantaneous upward pitch change in the voice of his beloved, and which features an electric guitar solo on the bridge). "Nikki" is one such solo effort, a bitter message to an ex-lover, here covered by one of my favorite artists, Canada's Gobble Gobble. While it's a tad odd at first to hear Cecil Frena trading his usual vivid, grotesque lyrics for "shawty, I been making love to Nikki," this jam still delivers a healthy dose of brilliant-but-off-kilter production, and for the umpteenth time proves Frena a mad scientist, but one reanimating dead pop music instead of corpses.
Another oddball indie take on standard pop music. Here it's more chillwave-does-Top-40-Hip-Hop, saturating a familiar-sounding (i.e. you've definitely heard it before) beat in reverb, synth washes, and ethereal vocals. Oh Fortuna ftw! [[I got this (as well as the next 3 tracks) from a really cool //free// compilation arranged by none other than Gobble Gobble, in honor of the artists they toured with this year. You can grab that HERE.]]
Glasser comparisons may be made, but Braids comes across as a little less tender than my co-blogger's recent muse, at least in this track. Awesome Indie/Synthpop track. Really cool production, and epic vocals. (Braids is also about to support Baths and Star Slinger on probably one of the coolest fucking tours to grace the surface of the earth, so check the dates here and get on that shit!)
An otherworldly, gorgeous intro of colorful synths paves the way for a hushed lullaby punctuated by magical synth strings being plucked underwater...all with a distinctly classical feel (and real strings at one point!). It's kinda like the intro to The Shins' "Sleeping Lessons," reimagined by a very shy baroque-pop group (how's that for an analogy?). This is a standout track from the mixtape, I can safely say I have never heard anything like it before in my life. Really cool production and composition going on here, even if it's not the catchiest tune ever. Check out Candy Claws, I know I'm going to.
This one's a fucking jam. Glitchy as fuck, but with a wicked bassline and a hard-hitting beat; it's like SebastiAn + 80's bass synths + soul...Old Arc is another name I will be looking further into.
Love these guys. Found em' on Apes With Barrels, who have great taste in electro-pop artists as well as their more rave-oriented counterparts. Funky, catchy well-produced; and that fucking lead after the chorus gets stuck in my head every time I hear it. Hooray for Human Life!
This post is about Etherea. He goes to Ithaca, or at least he did at the time of this release, which means he is really talented for a young dude. He makes music akin to Toro y Moi, in the sense that it tends to get classified as "chillwave" or "glo-fi," but there's an undeniable hip-hop/beat scene influence in the music as well. His myspace calls it "psychedelic....created in headphones, created for headphones," and I'd say that's pretty dead on. I guess you could call it psychadelic indie beat music, or "psychedelindiebeat"..................a genre name I just invented that I will proceed to squeeze all music under at some point.
Back to what matters: the music! It's really fucking good, and it's from all the way back in 2008!! That's the year FlyLo's seminal Los Angeles was released, for those who don't know...the beat scene washardly the popular phenomenon that it is today. It seems this dude just slipped under the radar, I can't imagine him NOT blowing up in this current scene, where dudes like Baths and Flying Lotus are becoming HUGE left and right. And as a matter of fact, I can most definitely hear a FlyLo influence in his remix of Animal Collective's "College," not to mention that his remix of "Birdo" by Josephine Foster straight up reminds me of Shlohmo. Really lush production + super hard-hitting beats = good shit.
Also his only release is a free mixtape, the fittingly titled Free Etherea. You have no excuses. If you've got no room on your HD, then delete your fucking Girl Talk albums and give this stuff a spin. You won't regret it.
Also if you really, really feel bad about getting rid of the Girl Talk, then let me inform you that he mashes up MF Doom and Wavves on the album. So click the goddamn link.
Lobster out.
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BONUS: new Bastille shit! That's the boys over at Apes With Barrels, for those of you who don't know. Awesome dance music blog, awesome dance music producers. GO GET.
Alright, let's be straight here. This is a music blog. We share music. Sometimes by giving it away for free. But we try to maintain some sense of ethics while doing so.
Music posted here is for promotional purposes only. If you have any copyright-related objections please comment or report or whatever and we'll take down the offending link.
On music submissions: email links n shit to dr.dr.musics@gmail.com or shnaily@gmail.com
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