STOP. NO. CALM DOWN. this is NOT turning into a hipster photo blog. its still a music blog run by two dudes with awkward sensibilities. i just couldn't find anything to put up to catch your eye so i gave you a pic of mine. anyway, heres some stuff fo choo. the three gobble gobble tracks are all different.. just goes to show that they do all sorts of stuff. (if you haven't figured that out yet.. well.. you haven't been paying much attention to them)
this is what precipitated this post.. this is really cool. preserves the original feel of the song while brightening it up a bit. Remix Artist Collective is something you should really check out if you enjoy indie music, electronica, and/or indie electronica. which should be all of you. (langosta, they have bloc party and kele remixes too..)
On yet another Low End Theory-related note, their monthly podcast is up!! Featuring mixes by L.E.T. resident DJ Nobody (my favorite of that crew, whose production work with Bomb Zombies you can check out HERE), and the up-and-coming wunderkind producer/MC jonwayne. This is one of those "no excuses" posts. Especially if you want a crash-course in what the L.A. beat scene is all about.
Or if you're just feeling particularly dark, heavy, and otherworldly today. :D
+ + + [[or just click it if you prefer to stream it]] + + + + +
Also, to my exuberant joy, I get to actually go to Low End tonight, since I'm back home for break. Patkins is burning with jealousy. Review to follow (because two posts tagged "Low End Theory" in a row is not nearly enough)
Music AND titties?! It's a good day for America, ladies and gentlemen.
Oh yes oh yes oh yes. If this post doesn't convince you to shell out a tenner, then I've failed to do my job....also it means you don't trust me. Which hopefully you should, seeing as we've been together for well over six months now...I THOUGHT WE HAD SOMETHING SPECIAL, INTERNET!! *sobs*
For y'all who don't know, Bomb Zombies is undeniably the best collab since Lennon/McCartney. Low End Theory residents DJ Nobody + MC Nocando = Bomb Zombies (though Nobody raps on a couple tracks too). Best name ever (and the music lives up to it). Their debut, Sincerely Yours, just came out this week on Nocando's label Hellfyre Club, and it is freaking awesome.
Just as with our loves 0. and Jonwayne, the best and most appropriately pretentious way to describe Bomb Zombies would be "the future of rap." That means screwed-up beats pulled directly from Low-End-Theory-land and brilliant, innovative lyricism to go along with it. But Nobody and Nocando manage to bring something else: the fucking party.
This isn't just what happens when a great rapper laces beat-scene instrumentals. Nocando comes off as more playful here than on his debut, Jimmy The Lock, forgoing brilliantly-penned angst, threats, and rants for proclamations that "young, dumb and reckless is the modus operandi" and homages to chicks with bangs (no joke. bonus track is called "Bangs"). And this is hardly just a Nocando solo show: Nobody throws down on a couple of verses, letting loose such absurdly brilliant gems as "who's your daddy girl?/is he the shit like me?/I didn't think so, girl" and "she got bangs, bangs, she got bangs, bangs/rock her hair in her face like it ain't no thang" (the hook from aforementioned bonus track).
Nobody's production also seems to take itself a little less seriously without sacrificing quality. There are a lot of mainstream elements here that you'd expect to hear from KIIS FM, not Low End Theory: cheesy pitch-shifted hooks, kitschy drum sounds, and auto-tune up the wazoo. But he takes all these things that we usually groan to hear and twists them all in just the right way to make something really new-sounding and hard-hitting: yes, you've heard that drum sound or synth before, but here there's something deliciously off-kilter about the way he's strung the song together, and no song is left without a neck-breaking beat; yes, he turns the auto-tune knob to 11 on most of the hooks (and a good deal of Nocando's verses), but here it's a stylistic choice: it's like mad-scientist-does-Top-40.
And I'm not just pulling these analyses out of my ass. The two were listening to a lot of Drake and Lil Wayne while on a tour of Japan, when Nocando uttered the prophetic words, "We should do a whole project where we try to do these kind of songs." (from this interview)
And that's what I love most about this record: it's innovative and aesthetically pleasing, but it's undeniably a take on mainstream rap. It manages to simultaneously deliver heavy bass, crisp beats, sick raps, and pure unadulterated swag. You get your pop hip-hop fix without the unsavory aftertaste of crap lyrics and mainstream production. These are two fantastic artists getting together and just playing. And the result? A great album full of funky, catchy jams. So stop reading this and get out your credit card/debit card/paypal password.
I'll provide some teasers to sway you all over, but no downloading cuz the point of all this is to get you to buy the album. Yes, it's unauthorized, but if it convinces you to pay up, then I've done my job.
Payola - Bomb Zombies
Sick shit. Fits in nicely with the Top 40 radio theme I was playing around with.
Get 'Em - Bomb Zombies
This is them doing a sexy club banger. And while the hook definitely sounds like it came straight out of commercial rap ("get em high/get em low"), the verses aren't just a bunch of simplistic tripe about how "shawty got a body like oh-oh-ohhhh." No, instead we get Nocando lacing words together like no other, which (aside from managing to be actually sexy) actually redeems the relatively inane hook.
Bangs (Bonus Track) - Bomb Zombies
Yeah. I had to. So great.
You get the idea. Buy this album, you will NOT regret it. And if you choose not to/are morally against buying music for some reason, then you can probably find it on mediafire somewhere. The primary point here is that you should get this album.
Gobble Gobble remixes Teen Daze! And vice-versa! This is a good day for any fan of these producers, as they've released a split EP with two original songs and each others' remixes thereof. It's pretty fucking awesome. So get it.
Shine On You Crazy White Cap (Gobble Gobble's Dive off the Beach Pier into a Lake of Clotted Blood) - Teen Daze
Hits much harder than the original, thanks to Cecil Frena's typically glitchy, distorted pop production, which complements the dreamy synths of the original quite nicely. To quote the man himself, "this remix is a bit evil. To borrow a term coined by Shaun Durkan of Weekend + Grem, one might even call it… chillgrave."
Lawn Knives (Teen Daze Remix) - Gobble Gobble
Same concept, in reverse. He takes the glitch-pop original and chillwaves it up with a smooth beat and the grand synth washes he's known for. Great track as well, though this one is probably more accessible than the other. I would guess this is because "Lawn Knives" is a better stand-alone pop song than "Shine On;" Teen Daze may bring the vibes in spades, but I've always enjoyed Frena's writing more, the man knows pop music. But that shouldn't discourage you from getting all this!
Download the EP to grab these tracks! [[ CLICK THIS SHIT ]] Also, accept the goat above as your god.
Oh yes. The Electro House Pirate Barons of Apes With Barrels, also known as Bastille, have made what I deem to be their best track to date. The intro is pretty simple, but the buildups are freaking cool and the DROPS (both of them)...my god, the drops. They masterfully combine the detuned high synth blips of their beloved Techno and Tech House with a dirty, dubstep-worthy bassline and a smashing Electro House beat. Really detailed, hard-hitting, and a fucking jam.
Well, I'm sure that my co-crustacean's recent tsunami of posts has kept you all very busy for the past couple days. The man had a lot of music to share, and BOY did he share it. But, given the outcome of the latest midterm election, I think it's about time for a change in leadership. So here's my first new contribution. Think of it as me overturning Obamacare, or something along those lines.
I made this mix during a campus-wide lockdown due to a murderer being on the loose nearby. Only way that relates at all to the actual content of the mix is the pun with the first track. Otherwise, it's a good-sized mix, half beat stuff, half electro house with a prog bent. I like it. Let's hope you do too.
1) Love Lockdown (Flying Lotus Remix) - Kanye West 2) After The Rain (Floating Points Remix) - Little Dragon 3) Quartz For Amber - Take 4) And We Gonna (Samiyam's Chopsticks Remix) - Shigeto 5) Maximalist - Baths 6) Talamak - Toro y Moi 7) Silent Alarm - Dntel 8) Flares - Dntel 9) Need To Feel Loved (Adam K & Soha Remix) - Reflect ft. Deline Bass 10) Move For Me (Extended Mix) - Kaskade & Deadmau5 11) Sasha Don't Sleep (Pance Party Remix) - The Dance Party 12) Seek Bromance (Porter Robinson Remix) - Tim Berg 13) Sofi Needs A Ladder (Original Mix) - Deadmau5 14) [Secret Track That Will Really Piss Patkins Off The Moment He Hears It]
So I'm getting a little tired of taking in so much music and not being able to get it out fast enough. Because of this I have decided to write a MASSIVE post with tons of stuff in it so i can stay away for a while. There are three categories: Indie, Beats, and Mixes. Look for folders at the end of each section to download everything.
INDIE Postcards From Italy (Beirut Cover) - Florence and the Machine Self explanatory. I love florence. Like The Wheel - Tallest Man On Earth King Of Spain - Tallest Man On Earth This guy has literally become one of my favorite artists of all time. These songs have so much soul, so much spirit, so much beauty... The Blues Run The Game (Jackson C. Frank Cover) - Laura Marling Another great folk song.. Laura Marling rules. Cold House - Teen Daze Chillwave meets the beat scene - lovely, delicate arpeggiated synths and atmosphere. perfect homework music... Minequest Try 03 - Deadmau5 This is a lot like the above, except its Deadmau5. Essentially a re-edit of Everything You Are, i wish this could go on forever... Scandal At The Parkade - Owen Pallett Classic Owen Pallett.. sounds like a string quartet sensibilities meet indie lyrics and vox. So good. Travel Broadens the Mind - Deerhoof Very interesting Deerhoof. Based on Congolese street music, this song reminds me of some of the beat music we post - complicated rhythm meets deerhoof's bass heavy/high lyrics sound. loovveeeee Down By The Water - The Decemberists This is going to come out on the Decemberists' forthcoming album in January.. they have this out for free for the price of my email. Enjoy. Good Night - Ellul I don't know anything about this because i found it in a mixtape. However, this is like Owen Pallett + Shitgeto + Teen Daze + awesome. Worth the listen. South Carolina - Tennis Okay, i DO know about these guys. Tennis is a husband-wife duo-turned-trio from colorado. They produce really warm, happy, vintage pop-inspired songs that make you just want to dance around with someone you love. Here is a collection of a few of their songs: Tennis.zip Their album, Cape Dory, comes out January 18. Gold Panda - Parents For El Langosta, because he likes Gold Panda.
Swimming - Mike Bigga This is another FlyLo produced rap song.. but, do you know that track from anywhere? OH YEAH, THATS CAMERA DAY FROM Pattern + Grid World. What a concept!
Concentration Mix - DJmus* (dedicated to our friend Mariel) This is supposed to be something you can play in the background while you are working on something important... mostly beats but also some various indie selections. Track List:
Weird Fishes/Arpeggi - Radiohead Everything In Its Right Place - Radiohead Mouthwash - Kate Nash Moon Hits the Mirrorball - Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs In Heat (Javelin Remix) - Health Comeandgetme - Steveandi Mirrorage - Glsr Gravel - Juj Tokyo to LA Steez - Hashim B. Nemo - Gobble Gobble Light #1 (Take Remix) - Nosaj Thing 7am (Devonwho Remix) - Shlohmo Trilingual Dance Sexperience - Dorian Concept Adrift (Shigeto's Adrift Adream Remix) - Tycho And We Gonna (Samiyam Chopsticks Remix) - Shigeto Bestdream - Etherea Wayward (Gobble Gobble Remix) - The Joe Sounds of Symmetry - Dntel
....and thats about all the cool stuff i have at the moment. Hopefully i will be able to leave you with this for a while and let El Langosta put something up. But for now, i hope you enjoy all this stuff!
If you pay much attention, you can feel the beat [scene exploding]. Here is a new Shlohmo track, plus some stuff from up and coming acts/people you probably didn't know about... enjoy! I know El Langosta will.
Feels like you are in a cave, dripping with water, with an indie band at the very back of it playing. One of CC's favorite indie bands, I might add. Ethereal processing and shlohmo's characteristic staccato synth lines... awesome.
I don't know anything about this guy (mostly because i failed to do any research), but this is really cool. Awesome percussion and groove, with 'motivational' samples throughout... really cool. I play this a lot.
This guy is signed to Ghostly International Records (Gold Panda, Shigeto, Mux Mool).. so you know he keeps good company. He is relatively unknown (a recent addition to the label), but his Shigeto/Mike Slott-like atmospherics sound pretty nice.
Another up-and comer.. Dibiase is from LA as well (El Langosta posted video of him spinning with Zeroh a few posts back). This track is very rap track-y.. in fact, i think he may have even played it in that set i parenthetically mentioned. Anyway, worth checking out.
This guy is from London. He's awesome. Besides the fact that anything with the word 'fox' in its title makes me happy, Fantastic Mr. Fox makes more forward things (think Flying Lotus' Do The Astral Plane more than, say, Matthewdavid or Shigeto). Anyway, i think this is a bunch of clips off of one of his singles.. i really can't find much from him. It's all buried in shit related to some stupid movie...
Dubstep definitely isn't something that is posted often on this blog, but thats mostly because a lot of dubstep really isn't any good. Anyway, I have found a lot of epic stuff recently that is worth sharing, with some extra goodies as well. Pick it all up here: Dubstep + Goodies
Although Trumpdisco themselves deny that this is dubstep, this is awesome dubstep. The original is good too, but this just kicks asssssssssssssssssssssssssss. If you downloaded the minimix i made for Langosta, then you would have heard this.
This is Flux Pavilion. He makes amazing dubstep. He uses crazy arpeggiated synths and heavy bass. This is what dubstep should be. If i can hear something like this played on speakers the size of my body, i can die happy.
This is perhaps the best track of this entire post. Datsik kills it almost every time, and I love Dragonette's voice.. (she was on a Martin Solveig track that i posted here as part of my mix). This is just so well crafted. God i love...
Awesome Tech house... excessively catchy bassline and about as indie a dude as it gets (he's living in berlin to work on music and a moustache.. and quotes thoreau).
I posted a couple Dorian Concept tracks a while ago. Yeah. That was before I listened to THIS entire EP. THIS IS FUCKING AWESOME SHIT. THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN PLANETS EXPLODE, I GUESS. Dorian Concept is a young beatmaker from Austria... and i love him. His sensibilities extend deep into his music and he makes prrretttty complicated stuff. Take the first track for example, Clap Beep Boom - he fucks with time but keeps the 16th note constant... first switching from sixteenths to triplets to pentuplets to sextuplets... but that one pulse stays the same. The rest of the ep continues this very clever use of Dorian's musical resources. Give this a good good listen. (Check the image for a link).
Hip-Hop keys get chopped and screwed to high heaven, drums stutter and skip frantically, and Canadian rapper The Joe drops some serious knowledge, all over a thick, buttery bassline. God dammit Cecil Frena. Save some of the awesome for us, why don't ya?
Gobble Gobble killin some beat music. And of course, why shouldn't they? They do share a label (Heart Music Group) with beatsmiths Baths and Star Slinger, after all. So you can understand why it warms the cockles of my heart to hear on their blog that they "want to do more of this kind of thing." What a brilliant time to be alive and musical.
Click that "Download" link on the player to zip over to The Joe's bandcamp and grab this baby for free. You do have to give them your email address, but bandcamp doesn't give it to spammers or dislists in my experience.
Dibiase on the decks while Jonwayne and 0. bless the mic. Wish I'd been in L.A. for this, but still. The point of this post is: beat music might be in the spotlight, but the future of rap is waiting in the wings...and I love it.
Yeah, this was one of those "god I love these fucking songs...how can I get them all on the blog without cluttering up the main page with a ton of insignificant little posts?" sort of things. So here you go. dadadadadadadadadadadadadada
This is like if Jupiter remixed Saturn (i.e. it's of planetary proportions). We here at Crustacean Cognition love both of these men very much, being the two giants of the L.A. beat scene that they are, and this track lives up to my expectations. Incredible drum work by Take, as usual...but the synths, the chopping of Nosaj Thing's original elements, and everything else is just as fantastic.
Takes elements of progressive house (i.e. chords) and electro house (i.e. bass) and fuses them seamlessly into THIS fucking track. Makes me want more Pance Party.
That's right. Mother. Fucking. Techno. No, not "techno" as in "generic term for dance music." Real techno. The cold, ominous, minimal sort of techno with all the weird noises. The kind of techno that people call "too repetetive." Except it's really not, if you give it a chance and listen close enough. Grabbed these last four tracks from Apes With Barrels, who aside from being the foremost authority on hardcore electro bangers, also loooove their techno.
And because this wouldn't be an absurd batch without at least one "WTF" track...this one's a jam by an indie/bluegrass band called The Sparrows. And it's banjo-centric. This is normally Peter's domain, I know, but my friend Marty showed me these guys recently and they're great.
Beautiful work from mister Tamborello, as usual, done as a promo for dublab's ongoing fundraiser. If you read this blog and have money (fat chance), you should head over and donate, they do beautiful work over there. But in any case grab this tune. So good.
BONUS [zip only]: grab the whole batch and we'll throw in a little minimix that patkins made to help me through a nightmare week. Sure, the support mix I made for him was a real mix, not a 5-minute one, and it had real dance music, not dubstep, but the thought was nice. Just kidding, it's boss. TURN YO SPEAKERS UP
Discovery is/are really cool. A side project of the keyboardist from Vampire Weekend and the frontman from Ra Ra Riot, Discovery have only put out one album so (the one above), from 2009. It's interesting. Its basically synth pop, catchy and fun. I especially like Osaka Loop Line, Swing Tree and Slang Tang, but the whole thing is lovable and worth a dedicated listen. I don't know what they are up to right now, but this is great music. Click the image for the link.
guys, i have a lot of stuff i want to post. bear with me if all you want to do is defenestrate yourself because of all the shit i put up here in the next couple days.... love you
It is a beautiful, beautiful day for music. XLR8R, may they live forever, have chosen producer/tape-fanatic/vibemaster matthewdavid for the latest installment of their Podcast. And the results are absolutely beautiful. His soundscapes will transport you. I don't have anything else to say about this, except "GET IT, NO EXCEPTIONS." You can even listen to the whole thing on the site for free before you download, that's what I did! But it's the best use of 45MB you could possibly imagine, I promise. This is why I love the beat scene...it thrives on innovation and experimentation, not how much you sound like FlyLo. Though we undeniably all aspire to achieve a similar level of awesomeness.
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
