As you may have noticed, I haven’t posted anything to this blog in a while. Several other projects have been getting my attention. Once things slow down, posts will hopefully pick up again. In the meantime, enjoy the archives. I also share plenty of music and art related things on my Tumblr and you can keep up with my personal work on my website. I’ll probably have some new mixes to post soon as well. See you soon…
2010 seemed like a good year for music. It had plenty of new artists and a few long-awaited returns. But I feel like my year-end list isn’t as strong as it could have been for a few reasons. This year I spent a lot of time digging through my collection and re-listening to older albums. Also, the number of albums I’ve bought this year is probably smaller since a few local music stores shut down. So I haven’t had chance to hear some albums, like Jneiro Jarel’s Fauna, Nottz’s You Need This Music or Laetitia Sadier’s Trip. But I still managed to pick up some highlights. They are…
Honerable Mentions
Bilal – Airtight’s Revenge
Big Boi – Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty
Black Milk – Album of The Year
Bonobo – Black Sands
Caribou – Swim
Dela – The Robert Glasper Beat Tape
Erykah Badu – New Amerykah Part Two (Return of the Ankh)
Esperanza Spalding – Chamber Music Society
Gonjasufi – A Sufi & A Killer
Madlib – Madlib Medicine Show
I posted this mix on my personal blog back in October for Halloween but never bothered to post it here. Well, now I am for those that missed it. I also put together one other mix featuring music pulled from my Sega Saturn game collection which I also neglected to post about.
Download: ♪ CoverCast #7: Kaiden
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For my seventh CoverCast I wanted to do something for Halloween. 怪談 (Kaidan) essentially means “ghost story”, so I pulled together a few of the darkest music I had along with clips from horror films and tv shows. Play it at your Halloween party or something! There’s a few minutes that are actually danceable. People will love it, maybe. Warning, there is some strong language.
This is the kind of news that makes my day! Warp Records is releasing a new EP by Flying Lotus in September called Pattern+Grid World, a collection of new tracks coming just months after his last full-length, Cosmogramma (probably my favorite album this year). If Reset is any indication, he is no slouch on his EPs so I’m really looking forward to this. Included with the album is a poster by Portland-based artist Theo Ellsworth (below).
I’m not familiar with Ellsworth, but he has a Flickr account packed with his work which is all pretty fantastic and surreal. A great match for Lotus’ sound, I think. Here’s another piece below that I liked, similar to the format of the poster, along with some amazing woodcut characters.
While I’m not sure what the rest of the album is going to sound like, I do know this (below) is the beat that Mike Bigga (aka Killer Mike) used for “Swimming” on Adult Swim’s recent Singles Program (also below). I want to hear more southern rappers over tracks like this.
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Download: ♪ Mike Bigga – “Swimming”
Update: As Judge Mental from Vinyl Meltdown pointed out in the comments, Ellsworth also illustrated this great cover for Ramona Fall’s album Intuit.
Flying Lotus
Theo Ellsworth
Theo Ellsworth @ Flickr
Warp Records: New EP Pattern+Grid World – out 20/21 September 2010
Adult Swim Singles Program
Ramona Fall
The “Madlib Invazion” has been going on for a long time, but this year Madlib is working extra hard to get as much money from my wallet as possible. The Madlib Medicine Show is a monthly series of albums all by Madlib. Odd months are original material, even are mixes. July’s release, High Jazz, is a compilation of new and unreleased tracks from the Yesterdays Universe collective. And by collective, I mean imaginary musicians that Madlib uses as a mask, bringing some friends like Karriem Riggins and Ivan Conti along the way.
The album is in much the same spirit as Yesterdays Universe, which I wrote about back in 2007. Each track is supposedly taken from rare records in Madlib’s giant collection, going as far as having Jeff Jank create covers for each, same as he did for Yesterdays Universe. The Blue Note/Reid Miles influence on the front cover is obvious. The other covers may be less so.
As with all odd month Medicine Shows (like #1), a 3 LP limited edition vinyl version (above) with covers screen-printed by the Hit + Run Crew was released. Of course it’s sold out now, but it looked very attractive. I also wanted to share what will soon be the cover of the next album in the series, Advanced Jazz. See how many jazz musicians you can identify crossing the Hudson.
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Download: ♪ Generation Match – “Electronic Dimension”
Madlib
Jeff Jank
Hit + Run Crew
DeviantART has a reputation of being a bottomless pit of amateur anime doodles and lazy photography. But really, there are a lot of great artists there (Jasinski, for example), though you may have to dig for them. One of those artists is ~trance-orange, aka Lala aka Lauren Albert. As soon as I came across her profile I was amazed by the colorful, distorted, twisted, at times multi-limbed/eyed figures that occupy her work.
She recently posted the piece up top, a cover for experimental pop artist Jihae’s single “Succubus”. This is actually a variant of what was actually used for the cover, which has a warmer orange and green color scheme. Above are two similar pieces from her portfolio. Also, an animation! Featuring music by The Knife.
Lala
~trance-orange @ DeviantART
Jihae
The Knife
To accompany The Cover Up’s new home, I’ve also begun migrating posts from my other album cover blog, The Cover Down, into a Tumblr page. After I’ve finished moving the old posts I’ll start scanning new covers from my collection. Yes, this is a Blogger exodus.