All song files on the blog are for sampling purposes. We support independent artists and strongly encourage everyone else to do so as well. If you really like someone's music, be a pal and see their concerts and buy their albums. If you wish us to remove any links to song files, please contact us and we will do so speedily.
Note: These lists are numbered, but only to satisfy convention. I happen to be one of the most indecisive human being on the planet, so pretty much everything other than my album of the year designation is arbitrarily ranked.
Albums of the year
1. Kanye West | My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
2. Menomena | Mines
3. Flying Lotus | Cosmogramma
4. oOoOO | CDR021
5. Tyler, the Creator | Bastard
6. Earl Sweatshirt | EARL
7. Arcade Fire | The Suburbs
8. Gorillaz | Plastic Beach
9. The Radio Dept. | Clinging to a Scheme
10. Grouplove | Grouplove
Honorable mention: Young the Giant | Young the Giant
If you like it, please consider sharing this with your friends, posting it on your Facebook, and/or tweeting the link to @kanyewest. As always, Muzjiks appreciates your loyal readership.
This guy knows how to wobble and wobble with conviction. Stenchman brings a unique wobble bass to the bro/dubstep (I can't tell which he is yet) genre. The following are dangerously unclean cuts. The wobble bass on these four is some of the grimiest, wide-wobbling I have ever heard. I'll stop not making sense and come to your own conclusion. Look for another post concerning Stenchman very soon.
His name is Stenchman for christ's sake. Oh, and Swine--the last one is for you.
I decided to take Christmas off for the series. The time off allowed me to take inventory of the amazing releases from Xmas 2010. Now, I have never celebrated Christmas "officially," but I assume there has to some kind of hangover involved. Heavy meats, deserts, booze, and distant family can be a lethal mix for someone trying to be productive on the Sunday after Christmas--so, what's the point? Embrace it and enjoy the 2nd track from The Fall, the Gorillaz iPad album (when is the marketing for that little Damon Albarn nugget going to start, Steve Jobs?).
You have to love the inclusion of the nylon strings on the album. On both "Revolving Doors" and "Hillbilly Man," those guitars paint beautiful soundscapes on their own. Can't wait to hear some acoustic versions of these songs. For now, we'll just have to do with this. By the way, each track comes with its own photograph--the photo for "Revolving Doors" is included below. What a nice touch, 2D.
Christmas is over, we made it another year my Jewish brethren.
For some reason, I have been running into Mike a lot recently. The 30 for 30 on his stint with the Birmingham Barons has been circulating around the ESPN networks, I have caught myself watching 1 too many Bulls games recently, and I just made an amazing MJ related purchase. Now, this tune just came across my radar. It had the "1996 bulls" in the tag, and let's be honest, how can it suck?
Sure, in terms of musicality, so-called brostep may be a total gimmick, but I don't think anyone can resist a good drop. So here's a handful of some of the most mental drops I've come across. Likely, this is just part one of many, but for now, four tracks will have to suffice.
As the Christmas Eve offering of the Gorillaz advent calendar, Damon Albarn and the gang have released the first cut off of The Fall, an instrumental track with a lot of synthesized bleeps and bloops. It's only track one, though, so I guess you could consider this the equivalent of Plastic Beach's "Orchestral Intro." Only one more day to wait until we have the LP in its entirety! There's literally nothing Santa schlep down the chimney that would make me a happier SWiNE than The Fall—which is a good thing because that fat schmuck doesn't come to my house.
Above: "Bastard" and "French" performed live at The Roxy Theatre in West Hollywood
I have a confession: I have a man crush on OFWGKTA's Tyler, the Creator. I follow him @fucktyler on Twitter, I've spun Bastard countless times, and I have a playlist on my iPod filled with every single Odd Future release. Tyler explains the appeal well in "Seven," the second cut off of Bastard: "Because I'm 17, compose my own beats, lyrically I'm dope enough to ass fuck the guy who made nicotine." Or maybe the allure is in those lethargic beats of which Tyler speaks, listlessly stumbling forward like the Wicked Witch of the East on barbiturates and giving Disaro's best a run for their gravewave money.
And if it's not the high-quality material this crew is producing at such a young age, it's Tyler, the Creator's perfectly gravelly voice. Pause. But really, the first time I heard him rap, I was sure that there was some kind of pitch shift or filter on his voice. It's got the gnarl of street veteran whose vocal chords have seen a bit too much smoke in their day—not a high schooler. In fact, I'd go as far as to proclaim Tyler, the Creator the joint recipient of the Best Rapper Voice award along with CyHi da Prynce (exhibit a: "she found out about April so she chose to Maaarch"; exhibit b: "my name ring beeellz"; exhibit c: "thugs think I'm a Blood 'cause I won't take this red suit oooff").
I'm sure that my love for all things OFWGKTA will yield a much longer piece in the future, but I'm trying to direct all my creative juices into this Kanye piece I'm working on (HYPE!), so I'll quit now before I dig myself deeper into a hole with all these questionable remarks about how much I love some dudes' voices. Now, get the hell on the East Coast's Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All bandwagon. I'm the driver.
Sorry this is late, but better than never. The Knocks are a electro duo that I have become very fond in the last few months. They write great dance tunes, perform live, and make great remixes. This is their 2nd or 3rd single (not sure what actually clarifies a song as a single anymore) after the epic, "Dancing With The DJ." Wham, bam I blacked out. The song is about selective memory after an epic night. L'chaim.
New Rick Ross song featuring Wiz Khalifa just released via Twitter. Guess what they're is rapping about? Morality and the importance of the War on Drugs. Just joshin'.
For normal people, Christmas is about family and giving thanks and presents and food and all that lovey-dovey bullshit. For me, Christmas 2010 is about one thing and one thing only: The Fall. On Saturday, Damon Albarn and the Gorillaz will be releasing their so-called "iPad album" on their website. (It's only available to stream for non-fan club members, but fuck knows it will be all over the Interwebz minutes after it's put up.) Comprised exclusively of songs written and recorded during the Gorillaz American tour, The Fall is a separate entity entirely from Plastic Beach; however, the LP is sure to have ample noodlings of Albarn on synthesizers, a direction hinted on Demon Days cuts like "Dare," developed further throughout PB, and continued on "Doncamatic (All Played Out)," the only track we've heard since Plastic Beach's release this past March.
It's this "Doncamatic" track that's likely to offer the most accurate hints in terms of what kinds of sounds will be populating The Fall. Although the original version of "Doncamatic" is stellar in its own right, the Joker remix found on the single release puts a purple spin on the tune. Let this one hold you over until Christmas morning, kiddies.
More traditional tonight. One thing I can't understand, though--how did this song not blow up? Chris Brown beatin up the beat (oh!), Yeezy with a above average verse and a killer hook. I guess Jive just doesn't have the distribution to get this in the hands of radio DJs and the oh so important bloggers...totally possible. This is indie major, man.
The posse that brought you 2010 standouts Bastard (Tyler, the Creator) and EARL (Earl Sweatshirt) dropped this Christmas-themed gem today on the OFWGKTA website. The beat is languid and lurching, as is typical of Tyler, the Creator's production, and Earl Sweatshirt returns from the abyss (boarding school?). What better Christmas present than Golf Wang's weirdo drugged-out raps and an Earl sighting?
For the record, in a totally non-elitist way, I'd like to remark that it amazes me how few people still don't know about these guys. They're making some of the freshest hip hop I've heard in a long time. Don't sleep!
Day 2 of the countdown: maybe not your traditional bump and grind but...I just feel a little dirty when I listen to this cut from Sound of Silver. The chunk of muted guitars and that subterranean bass line can drive you crazy, man.
For all of our loyal listeners, the wait is almost over. MuzjiksFM live from WALT studios in Davidson, NC, will be back on air beginning in January, so start carving out an hour of your life every Thursday at 10 PM so that you can spend it with us. And, as always, we will be offering a podcast and, this go around, Soundcloud uploads of every episode for your continued pleasure. As the date grows closer, check back here for the streaming link and more information. Until then, we suggest you subscribe to our podcast (click that big purple icon on the right sidebar) right now and enjoy your time here on the blog.
I'm admittedly pretty disillusioned right now after having experienced and been disappointed by my first live dubstep gig this past weekend in Atlanta (more on that later), but as long as there's labels like Night Slugs around, there's still hope for the movement—no matter how many raving, MDMA-maddened bros there are to dilute the solution. With a roster consisting of Jam City, Girl Unit, Egyptrixx, Velour, and Kingdom among others, NS has been unbelievably consistent in releasing one quality record after another. And did I mention that NS released a roster-spanning compilation at the end of last month? With head-spinning tunes from track one to track thirteen, the compilation could've very well been a five-year retrospective, but Night Slugs have only been at it for one year. Along with the Hyperdub, DMZ, and Circus, it's no stretch to categorize NS up there with the trailblazers of the genre—if not sprinting ahead of them tauntingly with its innovative mix of dub, electro, glitch, IDM, and UK garage.
Perhaps this is the label's biggest compliment, however: if you played me twenty dubstep tracks and asked me to pick out the Night Slugs releases, I probably could do it. Not because my ear is stellar or because I'm all-knowing or anything like that, but rather because there's a certain sheen to everything NS puts out. From the Day-Glo color palette employed in the album art to the meticulous mastering that ensures precise kicks and delightful sound separation, Night Slugs makes it perfectly clear that they mean business and aren't going anywhere any time soon.
Every day from here to 2011, we will be featuring a unique party track. This is a way for me to both get my head screwed on straight for a special NYE/NYD trip and to possibly create the mix of all mixes. This will be meticulously curated and I hope you have the time to appreciate our selections. We are going to start with a pretty dusty record from MC Breed.
So the acclaim for MBDTF has spiraled out of control. The amount of praise of Kanye West's latest album has become a national epidemic for which there is nor will be a vaccine (check Muzjiks in the coming days for more on that). What hasn't been mentioned enough, in my opinion, is the structural formation of some of these album tracks and tracks included in Yeezy's "Good Friday" series. I have personally never seen anything like this. These are hip-hop jazz epics. The man has collected what he has dubbed the best in his genre at the given time (or what he has access to) and allowed them to take free reign over a melodic idea. Please listen to John Coltrane's "Moment's Notice" and note the melody that begins at :39. This is the nugget that drives the piece, but John Coltrane (tenor saxophone), Chris Fuller (trombone), Lee Morgan (trumpet), Paul Chambers (D Bass), and Kenny Drew (keys) all get their hacks before the whole thing is bookended by the piece's outro.
Listen to "Monster" and "So Appalled" and tell me you don't feel the same thing. Kanye grabs a melodic idea, flushes it out, and lets his friends shit all over it. Listen to "Christian Dior Denim Flow" and the new single, "Christmas in Harlem" and dismiss them as b-sides; I dare you. Now you have no excuse, the latter two are featured below in down-loadable MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 format.
Enjoy yourselves, now you can say you listen to jazz.
A break from grind gives the both of us time to reimmerse ourselves in the blogosphere. Within the hour, I will make the arduous journey down to Atlanta for The Masquerade's Dub the Halls show, braving the snow and sleet for this meeting of the dub gods on our side of the pond. Throughout the gig, I will be tweeting pictures and updates @muzjikssteven.
So the site is a little rusty. Everyone is done with finals, I have two arms to work with and I figure we should start throwing up some music. Dream pop baby--picked this up from the G vs. B November mix and just cannot stop spinning. Young Galaxy is signed to Arts&Crafts (good for them, they seem to know what they're doing). I hope you enjoy the song. Look for more soon. We loooove you.
Our friend Daniel Goldstein sent this Wolfgang Gartner mashup over to us. He pairs the club banger that reportedly took Gartner 600 hours to make with Stevie Wonder's pop classic, "Superstition." We're glad to share this with you all. Hope you enjoy.
If you like what you hear, check our fellow lantzman's Soundcloud.
Honestly, this is a shameless attempt to drum up some site traffic because I know Hype Machine users go ape for mashups. Yes, we're selling out. Deal with it.
If you're not familiar with the microgenre of nu-jazz, please allow me to explain: Imagine an alternate planetary system somewhere way out in the cosmic unknown. Let's say that at the center of this system is a sun, and this sun happens to be called Jazz. Like all suns, Jazz has a gravitational pull that causes other celestial objects to orbit around it. Now, envision Nu-Jazz on the very outskirts of Jazz’s pull—the Pluto of this musical solar system, as it were. Fittingly enough, some might argue that Nu-Jazz isn't even part is this solar system, and these folks have a valid case. After all, even though Nu-Jazz is still within Jazz’s field, it wobbles on its axis in a most peculiar way and revolves ever so off-kilter, threatening to hurdle off into space at any moment—perhaps to the neighboring Hip Hop galaxy or maybe to the Electronic sector or perchance to the Funk nebula. It may be grounded in the tenets of traditional jazz—what with its jittering syncopations and intricate polyrhythms—but the ancestry of nu-jazz ultimately sums to a sound wholly unique from its parts.
Now, please follow me back to Earth and join me in Winnetka, California. A small town outside of Los Angeles, Winnetka is to nu-jazz as Columbia, SC, is to chillwave and Manchester was to post-punk in the late ‘70s; that is, it is the birthplace, the evolutionary nexus, and for all intents and purposes, the headquarters of the genre. Specifically, the HQ is located at Brainfeeder Records, the label started by nu-jazz giant Steven Ellison, the man behind the Flying Lotus moniker. A nu-jazz all-star lineup, Brainfeeder is also home to fellow genre bigwigs Daedelus, Samiyam, and The Gaslamp Killer. I’m not sure one abstruse, name-dropping example will help clarify another, but it might help to think of Brainfeeder as the nu-jazz equivalent of witch house’s Disaro Records, which lays claim to oOoOO, White Ring, and host of other esoterically renowned musicians…
On second thought, like the often abrupt harmonic shifts in nu-jazz music, allow me to abandon my admittedly futile attempts at explaining music through obscure analogy and convoluted imagery, and let’s let the music do the explaining—specifically Flying Lotus’s magnum opus, Cosmogramma. Sure, the LP came out this past May, but if there was ever such a thing as an instant classic, this is it. A surprisingly tightly conceived concept album, the record builds in warm, ethereal, yet altogether epileptic samples that let the listener know that he’s in nu-jazz’s nerve center, as it were. This pre-liftoff procedure continues until track six, “Computer Face/Pure Being,” where FlyLo introduces the first out-and-out melody in the form of a massive synth line, and the engines start revving.
Then, Flying Lotus at ground control sends Major Thom Yorke to outer space on “…And the World Laughs with You.” And it is here, I’d say, where Ellison’s true genius is exhibited: instead of putting Yorke’s vocals front and center in the mix, he opts to utilize the Brit’s wavering wail as an instrument. This is ballsy. After landing perhaps the biggest and most respected name in modern music in the Radiohead frontman, Steven Ellison buries Yorke’s voice beneath a load of reverb and dizzying synthesizers and even chops it up—just to feed it back to us in sampled splices.
These moments of genius are by no means scarce events, mind you; rather, they’re hidden and are only revealed through repeat listens. For example, in the sensual “MmmHmm,” you’d have yourself a radio-worthy R&B hook and melody if the frantic bass line and overdriven percussion were silenced. Then, in “Do the Astral Plane,” FlyLo plays with the listener at 3:32, dropping out the Kanye-esque lilting strings and club-ready electro synths so that only the claps remain. It is here, in the negative space, that the listener realizes how much controlled chaos Flying Lotus is managing at one time.
And when we get to “Table Tennis,” we find nu-jazz’s answer to Enrique Iglesias’s “Do You Know.” But unlike its pop counterpart, the intervallically irregular ping-pong in “Table Tennis” is in no way danceable or immediately poppy; instead, it brings us full circle. That is, “Table Tennis”—perhaps the anthem of the nu-jazz microgenre—features guest vocalist Laura Darlington singing of gravity and motion and energy and elasticity, reminding us of the abstract lineage of this music. In a way, this penultimate song of Cosmogramma brings us back to a certain aural Great Unknown. We once again find ourselves traveling through the acoustic cosmos, steadily learning the arcane musical grammar of nu-jazz with each listen with Flying Lotus as our guide.
The last two weeks of writing/posting on this blog has been hectic to say the least. Its been full of covers, mash-ups, and remixes--none of which I am honestly proud to put my name behind. So to right the ship, I thought we would go back to where indie, arguably, began--the movement of the Velvet Underground, Nico, and Andy Warhol.
After Andy Warhol took the reigns of PR for the Velvet Underground, he suggested a musical/cultural partnership with Christa Päffgen (AKA Nico). The band was hesitant, but the partnership ultimatley led to the band's reformation and subsequent debut The Velvet Underground and Nico-- need I say more? Following her work with Lou Reed, Nico moved on to a solo career and a partnership with some of the most important American songwriters in our musical history. That's what leads me to today's post.
Bob Dylan penned this song for the beautiful, talented Christa Päffgen and she grabbs it by the balls. The string arrangements and the vocal cadences make the song--oh and the writing isn't bad either.
"Where Burial finds romance in the darkest night, Salem’s dubstep-drenched electro exists in a world of prostitution, violence and abuse, employing bizarre half-tempo rap sections that growl like burst exhausts."
So we're pretty into dubstep around here, but what Salem brings is almost sacrificial, sacrilegious dubstep--you immediatley know whose violenlty distorted bass is blaring through the speakers and you shiver. Let's see what happens when they get a hold of one of the Boss' greatest darkly tinged pop tunes. Both are provided for reference and clarity's sake.
edit: my bad, this is "Witch-House"--just for iTunes library. Everyone can breathe now.
This had to be a ton of hard work. Norwegian Recycling sent Muzjiks a message in hopes we would post his latest DJ Earworm style mashup-- this shit is too cool not to post. Keep on truckin' Pete. Hopefully, we will another full feature concerning the validity of this type stuff in the near future (maybe an interview, Pete??). The Miracle Rip...
I might not even be of legal drinking age, but I already find myself nostalgic about my youth, wary about growing old. I miss Freeze Pops and Capri Suns after riding around on my neighbor's Razor scooter (my parents never let me get one). I miss being scared shitless by Are You Afraid of the Dark? and loving every minute of it. I miss SuperSoakers and Creepy Crawlers and SNICK. Music, however, is a medium that allows one to momentary return to a certain place and time—Third Eye Blind, Semisonic, No Doubt, Blind Melon, and Chumbawamba just a handful of the artists with that evocative capacity.
Essentially taking the lead from DJ DoYou of "Stuntin' Like Mufasa" fame, rapper A-1 has capitalized on my generation's collective nostalgia and made a somewhat gimmicky, somewhat kickass mixtape that combines A-1's Wale-esque raps with popular 90s TV themes. Reading Rainbow, All That, Pokemon—hell, even Doug makes an appearance. Perhaps my favorite moment, however, comes as A-1 fakes being sick in order to stay home from school in classic Ferris Bueller fashion. One of his first orders of business? Watch The Price is Right, the mainstay of every sick child's programming schedule. I think everyone remembers watching Bob Barker and those 80-year-old-and-up targeted ads (see: Hoveround, Colonial Penn, and Wilford Brimley) with a glass of orange juice and some Campbell's Chicken Noodle (or, if you're as lucky as me, mom's homemade matzo ball soup and matzo brei).
So, without further ado, I invite you to sit back, turn on these tunes, and relive your youth for a few minutes. And for the full experience, consider downloading the full mixtape, After School Special, over at DatPiff. Enjoy.
So there are probably some days that artists are too damn lazy to write their own songs. Besides aren't there enough songs written already? Well, there are also days where bloggers are too lazy to find new music--so we post covers. After a long weekend, bask in the laziness and the creativity of some sweet covers (two separate Britney Spears covers!).
A bit of background: Above is my first project from the Music Technology and Production class at Davidson College. Each student's task was to score this trailer, which was given to us with the original audio removed. It was then up to our imaginations, creativity, and the vast selection of studio equipment at our disposal to create our own score for the clip. This is my attempt...
Although I’m obviously not as musically talented as Clint Mansell, his scoring work—namely in π and Requiem for a Dream—was a big influence on the approach I took to this project. The dark atmosphere of the T3 trailer and the metallic substance that demands the viewer’s attention throughout really gives me the sense that a crunchy, industrial sound is the best fit musically. I considered this visual subject matter along with the short running time of the clip and the obvious suggestions of mickey mousing (sawing of the numeral “3” from the metallic block, the droplets, etc.) and thereby concluded that this should not be a hum-worthy, melodic piece—that is, no theme music here. Thus, I set out to create a largely dissonant score that is respectful of the long-standing film music convention of synchronizing visual events with musical events, an idea that dates back perhaps most famously to Max Steiner's score for 1933 King Kong.
I think that one of the main questions an artist—or someone attempting to be artistic—asks himself after reaching a stopping point on a piece (art, as it is said, is never “finished,” per se) is whether or not the image on the canvas or the sound coming out of the speakers is what he had envisioned in his head. To this query, I must say: No. Not only am I limited in terms of my past music-making experience, but there were also several instances in which I had a certain timbre in my head and couldn’t figure out how to make the technology produce that sound. For instance: ideally, I would’ve liked a sort of aural chase between booming metallic footsteps and pitter-pattering sneaker footfalls that created a rhythmic percussion over which I could lay the industrial synths. However, both my music-making chops and technological aptitude will improve with time and practice, and honestly, I must say that I’m fairly satisfied with my first stab at electronic music production, all things considered. Enjoy.
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