When It Rains it Pours: The Return of Danny Brown | June 14, 2016 |
You’re Dead was almost Talmudic in its intentions. It aspired to merge rap and jazz and beat music, write requiems for the dead and resuscitate flat-lining souls. If you can criticize it, it’s via that Icarus curse of over-ambition. Sometimes, the fusion soared. Sometimes, it got soupy and overly ambient. Like many musicians who work […]
When Mount Kimbie first emerged from the ashes of the dubstep scene in 2009, they were quickly tagged with the “post-dubstep” distinction along with their friend James Blake. By 2012 though, dubstep had become a dirty word altogether and with the rise of EDM and “bro-step,” virtually no one wants to align themselves with the […]
Video: Grizzly Bear – “Yet Again” | September 27, 2012 |
This is just your normal video in which a champion teenage ice skater falls through the thin ice in a skating rink and ends up almost drowning in frozen water. Thankfully, she emerges from the arctic sea and winds up at a carnival where she declines to drink some slush puppies. Obviously, she is still […]
Video: Flying Lotus – “Putty Boy Strut” | September 19, 2012 |
Disregard the rumors that this is a tribute to Elaine Benes’ boyfriend, David Putty. Yet the mechanics remain sound. Enter ethereal dancing robot music. Not to be confused with the sad robot twerk waltzes of Future and/or the Drakebot 3000. The loose concept surrounding Flying Lotus’ fourth album (queue Mad Rapper clip) is that it’s […]
Flying Lotus & Erykah Badu See Thru To U | August 16, 2012 |
The word rumbling around Low End Theory last year was that Flying Lotus and Empress Badu were recording a joint album. That explained the DJ sets in Lincoln Heights, the public Tweeting, and the trail of pixie dust that briefly lingered in the Airliner after she graced the club. Recently, Lotus revealed that the songs […]
Grizzly Bear – “Yet Again” | August 2, 2012 |
Grizzly Bear again? Ah yeah, again and again. With two songs leaked from next month’s Shields, the ursine squad are the only contenders to take Ariel Pink’s crown for my favorite album of the year involving guitars. Even though their piano lines and layered vocal harmonies seem to provide the music with most of its […]
Bibio – “Excuses” | February 1, 2011 |
On one hand, Bibio was lucky to escape any and all lame “chillwave” labels that may have been lazily ascribed to his sound — a truce between Boards of Canada and folktronica-era Four Tet. Of course, the Warp-signed Stephen Wilkinson has been doing this before Washed Out was first bleached, so it’s unlikely that he’d […]
Flying Lotus-“Kill Your Coworkers” Video | October 18, 2010 |
Flying Lotus – Kill Your Co-Workers from beeple on Vimeo. Some will interpret Flying Lotus’ robotic-futuristic-Main St. parade-cyborg war as a trenchant commentary on automation in society and hatred for co-workers. I prefer to see this Rorschach clip as a hybrid of the “Whacking Day” parade from “The Simpsons” crossed with the “Itchy and Scratchy” […]
Flying Lotus, Infinity, and Astral Planes | May 18, 2010 |
Whether or not the accolades were deserved or not, the self-fulfilling nature of the Internet hype machine assured that Flying Lotus would be crowned the new king of dubstep, or wonky, or beat music, or whatever inane label journalists ascribed to him this month. I suspect one of the more underlying points of Cosmogramma was […]