Quick News, Links, Bits, Reads: Playing catch up on links I’ve accumulated. … Is the Nintendo DS video game Electroplankton out of print? Someone’s selling it for over 70 bucks, used, on amazon.com. (Thanks, Jeff.) … Speaking of which, amazon.com has updated its underacknowledged free-download service, now as part of the blue-light specials at amazon.com/mp3deals. […]
There’s no didgeridoo on the five-track album Altered Signals by Mystified (aka Thomas Park), but there may as well be. Much of the music heard here has the slow, otherworldly onomatopoeia of that aboriginal device. The collection opens with the title cut: the crackle of data, the ping of noises echoing in a long, narrow […]
The remix project Our Lives in the Bush of Disquiet has been downloaded over 20,000 times, as of today. I uploaded the set in early September 2006. It is an homage to the then 25-year-old (and now 27-) album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Brian Eno and David Byrne. Bush of Disquiet […]
From wall text at an exhibit currently on view at the Architectural Heritage Center in Portland, Oregon:
there is not much good that is not in some way based on something old that is good
The sentiment serves sample-based composers and remixers.
The full context of the quote is: “All my training has been in offices doing classical […]
The influence of jazz on hip-hop is never as evident as on cuts of the latter that sample the former, and that legacy in transition is rarely as fully fleshed out as on Turntable Jazz, a recent podcast by DJ ZedVantz. The set packs together 11 cuts, including a Billie Holiday remix and more great […]
The aspiring hip-hop producers who populate the forums at cratekings.com work together for mutual musical benefit — and not only by commenting on each other’s work and pushing the collective to tweak each sample, hone each beat, and better craft each instrumental track that they post. They also collaborate, as on the 14-track compilation of […]
Indie hip-hop figure Oh No has provided an album-length podcast for the Stones Throw label (stonesthrow.com/jukebox), in which he mixes up various afro-jazz tracks from the group Oneness of Juju, led by prolific saxophonist Plunky Branch. It’s a rough mix, with occasional gaps between tracks, and noticeable delay in some of the beatmatching, but Dr. […]
What I’ve been most focused on, listening-wise, this past week:
(1) A Late Winter: First Snow, the Guy Pearce film, came out about a year ago, but Cliff Martinez’s score only saw release last week, at least according to iTunes, which lists the release date as June 10, 2008. The score’s 20 tracks of intimate […]
In hip-hop, nothing sounds as contemporary these days as old school. It’s remarkable how much excellent beatmaking has resulted, of late, from the combination of a slightly dusty vocal sample, tweaked just so, and an automated beat. It’s a style perhaps most closely associated with A-list producer Kanye West, but everyone from Just Blaze to […]
Danger Mouse and his partner in Gnarls Barkley, Cee-Lo Green, spoke on Thursday, May 29, with NPR Fresh Air host Terry Gross about the construction of their new album, The Odd Couple. Asked by Gross about how the prevalence of sampling in hip-hop may have influenced the way Danger Mouse thinks about music, he replied:
I […]