DJ Suva played two of my tracks last night on Remixta, both off The Sowl Files, and I was in good company I have to say… some killer tracks in the playlist. So y’all should check it out over at the site, here’s a direct link to the latest episode. Remixta is a podcast playing tracks made in the lovely music application Renoise, keep reading for some more info.
Here’s the about blurb off of there (which I shamelessly copied :)
Remixta is a monthly music podcast run by estonian DJ Suva and dedicated to playing music made with Renoise tracker. During the month, I collect all the new Renoise music from Renoise Forums, SoundCloud, Myspace and the tracks people send me directly. I choose the tracks I like the best and play them in 40 minute to 1h DJ set Live over IceCast. Everyone can tune in and listen the live show, and if they miss it, they can always relisten the podcast form of the show.
Ok, it’s official, the new Atari Blitzkrieg album 12.31.99 is out and about causing a ruckus. If you pick it up now you’ll get the EP called 12.30.99 for free, offer expires tomorrow. So where to get it? Ataris site is a good place to start.
The EP takes place a day before 12.31.99, coming in at 14 tracks it’s more of an LP I guess.. anywho, with tracks produced by Jazz Spastiks, Krohme, Cadence, Moka Only, Nick Wiz, MackeralSalad, DJ A.I., Blockhead & Digital Fiend, and with all sale revenue going to charity (for both the EP and the main album) it could be a nice buy I think. You can pick it up separately right here, if you wish.
Ok on to the main album..
The 2nd full-length from Atari Blitzkrieg, 12.31.99, takes place both sonically and spiritually on New Years Eve, 1999, all the beats have that flavour and were either made back then or made to sound a bit like it did back then.. good stuff. I got one beat on there, which was made in ‘98 I think, have to check to be sure. It’s a split track with the other half produced by Damian Calculon. Other producers on there include Krohme, Nick Wiz, Psycho Les, Bronze Nazareth and others, with guest appearances by L.I.F.E. Long, Lil Dap, Vast Aire, Breez Evahflowin, C-Rayz Walz and more.
I haven’t heard the whole thing yet, so I can’t really comment on it, but from what I have heard, it’s sounding good!
As mentioned you can grab it off Ataris site at a reduced price at the moment, but it will be available over at Amazon, iTunes and what have you, shortly. Oh.. and if you wanna preview it, Atari has a sampler up right here. Not sure if I should direct link it so I won’t, but it’s right there on that page.
So.. I hope y’all had a good Yule & New Years.. speak to you soon! Easy.
Time for another recommendation.. this time we got The Lick by St Liquor-ish aka Jellphonic. Personal fav off the EP has to be Moneysack (2nd tune in the player) which is the tune I remixed as well. P-Funk for the 21st century baby!
After 13 long years, 14 studios and a gazillion dollars the highly anticipated first EP from St Liquor-ish, formerly and simultaneously Jellphonic, is ripe.
The first solo EP – “The Lick” smashes jagged beats with sacred subjects such as sex and hating with subtle undertones of grace and pornography. Collaborations for the EP include the smooth vocals of Lisa Preston on “The Junk” and the Electron Don, Zackey Force Funk on “Money Sack”.
Atari Blitzkrieg… One of the most active & productive people I’ve ever met, put out a free compilation a couple of days ago, August Plush. It’s a cross section of his many EP’s, plus some unreleased and new tunes. So if you’re not familiar with him, head over to his homepage (iamsubstance.com), sign up for his newsletter, and grab the 34 track compilation.
Featuring production by Atari, Krohme, Bronze Nazareth, Moka Only and a bunch of others, with guest appearances by Royce Da 5′9, Breez Evahflowin, Vast Aire, Sadat X, Louis Logic and LMNO… to name a few. It should be a nice starting point and a good first glance into his world. At the moment he got several new projects going, one with yours truley, which will see the light of day later on this fall.
Thought it was about time I made another album recommendation, here we go…
SoundscisDig For Victory
Peep the tune The Remedy..
I ordered it a while back but hadn’t gotten round to listening to it properly until yesterday, and man, it rocks. True school hip-hop (or whatever you wanna call it) galore. I highly recommend that y’all grab this gem on vinyl before it’s sold out. You’ll still be able to grab the digital release if it is tho.. but vinyl is vinyl. You can preview all the tracks over at their bandcamp page.
Buy the Digital Release here or the CD & Vinyl here.
Here’s an excerpt from the release notes…
Soundsci is the brainchild of Jonny Cuba (One half of now disbanded Dynamic Syncopation) and Audessey (Founding member of Mass Influence) after collaborating previously on numerous occasions for Ninja Tune (Ground Zero, Dedicated, Systematic and 2 Tha Left), they kept in touch and continued making music together. As more tracks were recorded and friends Ollie Teeba (Herbaliser), U-George, and Therapy got brought into the mix it made sense to make an ep rather than single and the “Dig For Victory EP” was born. As a bonus track we are honoured to include an older track produced by Audessey featuring Jax from Binkis who unfortunately passed away last year and Reality. Using their b-boy ethics while not getting caught up in the past it thumps hard and reminds you why you love hip-hop.
The EP is limited to 275 hand numbered red vinyl ep’s and 10 test pressings on black vinyl with individual artwork never to be repressed. The first 100 standard copies come with a CD of all the tracks and bonus folder with instrumentals, acapellas and remix competition.
OK, where to begin. I’ve already written this once and lost it due to a program crash, but I’ll give it another go. I’ll talk about WordPress plugins, a couple of sites and some programs that I think will save you time and improve your workflow, at least they do for me.
Just to be clear, this is more about all the administrative things you have to do as an artist today and about streamlining your workflow, not about the actual music making process.
Social Networks & Websites
I was looking around for some place that would allow me to update all, or most, of the social networks I’m on, from one place. Since as an artist you don’t really have the luxury of choosing one of them, you have to be on all of them, and keeping it all updated by yourself is more or less a full time job. I wanted to minimize the time I needed to spend updating all those places, and after searching around and testing various services I found ping.fm. It allows you to add networks like facebook, facebook pages (which doesnt seem to be supported in many places yet), twitter, tumblr, myspace and a ton of others, and you can update them all from there, either in one go, or individually.
After I set that up I wanted some way to use it from my desktop so I wouldn’t have to fire up the browser, go to the site, login and navigate to the right page every time I wanted to update something. Some more searching ensued and after a while I found MePing, not the prettiest thing around perhaps, but it does what it does very well. Namely import all your networks and custom posting rules from ping.fm and allows you to update, that’s it. Time saved!
OK, then I was thinking, what if I could integrate this site into ping.fm as well, I already had a plugin that updated Twitter every time I made a new post, but what about all the other networks. Once again I went on the hunt and I found WordPress 2 Ping.fm, I’ve been running it a couple of days now and it seems to work flawlessly. It sends an update to ping.fm, which automatically posts it to your configured networks, every time you publish a new post on your blog…
More time saved for important things like actually making music.
Alright.. What to say about Blame Ones latest album, besides that it’s good and you shouldn’t sleep on it. With production by Exile, Black Milk, Kankick, Blu and more, and guest appearances by Sean P, Blu, to name a few, even Exile steps up on the mic, it’s hard to see how it can go wrong… and it doesn’t. I met Blame a couple of years a go, through a mutual friend, and he’s def one of the good guys, so show some love and go cop his album!
I thought I’d put up some preview song(s) off his album but I decided to go with a tune we did a couple of years ago instead. You can preview the entire album on his myspace, so I thought it might be more interesting to share something else.
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Thought I’d put up a couple of other recommendations I’ve come across.
First up Norways HandyCat with her solo album International Rap Foreplay.
I stumbled across her on myspace a while back and managed to forget all about it, then I did it again a month or so ago, posted a comment, we got talking a bit and ended up trading albums. And I gotta say her album is good, so y’all should look her up and get it from her. You can peep a few songs on her myspace. She also co.runs an indie label called Bonsaiety, so check that out as well.
I’ll say it again.. Support the good stuff folks! :)
Alright.. with that rant out of the way, let me get on some more positive things. A new album has dropped, and a really good one at that! Namely (as the title says)… IDE & DJ Connect’sTable of Content: The Prequel To Ideology.
IDE, out of the Creative Juices crew (which you should know about already, if you don’t, go look them up), and Swedens own DJ Connect, from the Elite Fleet crew, have teamed up for this album.. and it’s good. You don’t have to take my word for it because there’s a mixtape version of it you can download for free. So grab that and if you like it, go and buy the album (also on ughh).
