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.
Mr. Oizo, aka the muse of those gentlemen over at Apes With Barrels, has mastered the aesthetic of weird-ass electronica. And yet he never misses a chance to bring the funk, either: chopped up slap bass, computerized vocal samples, and weird little pitch-bent clavichord breaks make this track an awesome little oddity.
Baths posted this track on his facebook page; it's by a friend of his. Really neat indie/beat music stuff, a lot of the sounds in there remind me of Baths' stuff, actually, specifically "Maximalist," but the expert vocal chopping and drum work reminds me a lot more like Duke Dumont's remix of Lily Allen...this is a really cool track, it's well-structured and awesome. And most importantly, it makes me want to hear more from this guy. Indie/electronica/beat track.
I know next to nothing about Themselves, but as you're probably aware by now, it wouldn't be our blog if we didn't post a Baths track...so here you go. No shame. Strange vocals, but not in a bad way at all. Great track.
Bomb Zombies (best name ever!!) is the EPIC duo of Low End Theory residents Nobody and Nocando: Nobody on the sick beat and pitched-up hook, Nocando killing it on the mic as usual. Their Sincerely Yours EP is out November 9 on Hellfyre Club, Nocando's label. And I cannot freakin' wait. "Fuck what you heard, this is what you need to hear."
matthewdavid, a dublab labrat and founder of the almighty Leaving Records, is the shit. He's certainly at home with the L.A. beatheads, but he has a penchant for fucking with field recordings and tape manipulation as well, so his stuff has this incredible experimental/atmospheric vibe. I love it.
Now for a certified JAM: Samiyam remixing Shigeto. Hell fuck yeah. Prepare to drown in heavenly sawtooth synth chords before the kick knocks yr skull in. Awesome percussion, bass, beat...Samiyam is a boss.
I know very little about the UK's Mount Kimbie, except that supposedly they put on one hell of a live show. And this track certainly supports that claim: it's super mellow, intricate, and performed live. I think they're generally described as "post-dubstep" (genre pigeonholing ftw), and you can hear why that is in the beat, but this is pretty damn far from dubstep, sharing more in common with deep house and UK funky in my opinion. But descriptions aside, give it a listen, it's a neat track.
BONUS [zip only]: The Fear (Duke Dumont Remix) - Lily Allen (<-- youtube link). Beautiful. One of my favorite songs ever, gorgeous synths and brilliant vocal chopping. Worth getting the whole batch for, we promise...
So Low End Theory is this weekly event at the Airliner club in Los Angeles. If you follow the LA Beat Scene, you'll probably know what Low End Theory is. For those of you that don't, it happens every Wednesday night, and it's where such experimental electronic beat-masters as Flying Lotus, Daedelus, Take, Shlohmo, Ras G, and (more recently) Baths go to showcase their work and live skills.
Their schedule for last Wednesday just said "Very Special Guest." This was my first time going (I wanted to attend the show a week before featuring Asura and Jonwayne, but I couldn't), so I wasn't sure whether I wanted to take a chance with whoever this was. But my friend Jeremy did a little facebook stalking, and the facebook profile of one Steven Ellison said he intended to play the Airliner on Wednesday. For those of you who weren't aware, that man also goes by the moniker Flying Lotus.
So Jeremy and I flipped a shit and made our plans. Prophet Zachariah, of the anti-pretentious music/film blog The Boy And Colors, was also in attendance. And man, was it a night.
So we walk in the door in the middle of Take's set. Take is one of my favorite beat music producers, his most recent record Only Mountain was incredible. Aside from programming some of the most innovative, non-repetitive drum patterns I've ever heard, he's a synth master; his production style just saturates you with them, from these thick, heavy bass sounds to all the little high-pitched blips and arpeggios riding on top of the mix. And on the legendary Low End soundsystem, all of it (especially the bass) just came to life.
I've posted this gem before but I felt it was appropriate for this review. Also it might be my favorite Take track.
By the way, there's a reason they call it "Low End Theory." Those subwoofers are on another level. This is bass that you can feel pouring into your ears like hot wax at the same time as you're feeling it rattle your ribcage. And not in an unpleasant way, it's really quite awesome. Even though it sometimes would eclipse other elements of the song playing, I have a feeling that's the point of seeing music in such a venue.
But yeah, Take's set (or what we caught of it) was fucking fantastic. Couldn't see much of it because the place was PACKED, but damn did we hear it. We got better positions for the rest of the acts, though.
Next up were some of Low End Theory's resident DJ's (Nobody, Daddy Kev, The Motherfucking Gaslamp Killer, and D-Styles), who pretty much all played dubstep sets, with some hip-hop in there for good measure. Nobody had the best set aside from Take and Flylo, he's a fantastic DJ. The others were definitely awesome too (can't speak for D-Styles cuz we missed his set), except that I think the crowd just got tired of dubstep by the end... Also: Gaslamp Killer was fucking RAW. He has the most fantastic stage presence ever, he pretty much physically acts out the bass sounds, which is really how I think you ought to DJ dubstep. Also he used a fucking iPad as a MIDI controller of some sort, manipulating beats on the fly. Pretty damn awesome, good to see the stupid gadget is good for something... Here's some video of Gaslamp killing it earlier in the evening.
Well, in the middle of Gaslamp's set Flying Lotus started wading through the crowd, and after another 15 or so minutes he'd finished his setup, and the show began. It took that long because he had a live bass player (Stephen Bruner aka Thundercat) and drummer (Ronald Bruner) to set up as well. Researching this post, I just realized the two are brothers. And they are tight as hell.
Thundercat is a fucking fantastic electric bass player with legitimate jazz chops. He riffs like a mofucka, which you can hear on FlyLo's last album, Cosmogramma. Specifically on "Pickled!", though he helped write and sang on "MmmHmm" as well; that's a more downtempo track and one of the more beautiful on the album in my opinion. Ronald Bruner is a jazz drummer of epic proportions. He's played with Austin Peralta, an alumnus of my school who is coincidentally signed to FlyLo's Brainfeeder label. Just watch this if you need proof of his chops.
Well, needless to say they fucking killed. They played in sets of about 10-20 minutes, with little breaks to orient the musicians (the drummer had never sat in with FlyLo before, which didn't even matter because he caught on in seconds, and nailed every pause or break. ah, the power of jazz). Mr. Ellison played about 50% new or unfamiliar material, 40% Cosmogramma, and 10% of his older stuff. Every once and a while he would cut out almost every element of the track that was playing and just let, say, a hihat or keyboard part play while the brothers Bruner just tore it up. Those breakdowns to just live bass and drums were fucking transcendent. Just wow. Brilliant musicians doing what they do best on the fly...it was like watching live jazz. Even when FlyLo was playing a song over the live music, all three of them were interacting and giving and taking and fuck was it awesome.
The best set by far was the fourth one. The rest had been at a hip-hop/dubstep sort of tempo, and then after a break flylo just brought out "Do The Astral Plane." The crowd went insane, and this was in a room about the size of my living room, mind you. And that set just went on in the same vein: he sped up the vocal from "Tea Leaf Dancers" and played it over "Astral Plane," then he kept dropping experimental electro house, banger after banger, and the brothers Bruner just rolled with it, keeping up that same intense jazz energy they'd had the whole night.
On the whole one of the best live shows I've ever been to. Anybody who says that playing electronic music live is essentially just DJing needs to see Flying Lotus. He plays with a live band a lot nowadays. And if you really want to have an epic Wednesday night, go to Low End Theory. The vibe there is amazing. The producers and artists are there to showcase their work, and they're just hanging around during the show so you can freely interact with them. The audience is there to see the work and have a good time, so weed and alcohol consumption, while still extant, is at a really reasonable level. People just seemed very chill and friendly. I think my work here is done. Til' next time, folks...
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