Not all charts are created equal. The wisdom of crowds can be a lot more convincing on a message board than on a sales chart. The top 10 albums of a given week, according to Soundscan, can be more a reflection of conventional wisdom and reactive consumerism than of individual taste or the state of […]
The forums at cratekings.com continue to be a great place to dig for excellent electronic music in the form of beat-heavy, sample-based solo work. Recent faves include Grimeshine’s “Hangover,” with its old-soul strings, punchy funk touches, vocals reduced to moany vowels, and a hot little minimalist piano riff (MP3, zshare.net, cratekings.com). More on the Seattle, […]
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 […]
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 […]
Internet forums dedicated to hip-hop production and other forms of electronically mediated music are packed with posts from bedroom beatmakers and home-studio soundsmiths sharing their work, most of them just looking for some feedback.
At the better forums, the feedback isn’t merely a pat on the back from a fellow traveler. Over at cratekings.com, for example, […]
The latest podcast from tablist.net — that’s “tablist” as in “turntablism” — collects about 20 tracks by the unsung home-studio strivers who are regulars on the tablist.net website, alongside some accomplished beatmaker players. The contents range from rhythm-heavy studio production to rap-ready instrumental hip-hop to goofy scratch-happy hijinks, leavened with the inevitable jokey soundbites.
As the […]
Chat rooms have a bad rap. They’ve gained a touch of the aura that used to hover around the word “hacker.” Though today it means something closer to “entrepreneur,” hacker used to be equivalent to “dangerous anti-social malcontent.” Chat rooms are social by definition, so they can’t be truly anti-social; but they still are saddled […]