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I posted about Santogold last fall, and her long awaited full length album is finally here.  After an extra two months of cold, rainy weather in Seattle, summer has also finally been DELIVERED.  It’s 80 degrees outside and the sky is a perfect blue.  I was driving around today, with my sunroof open, windows down, the new Santogold blasting and I felt like king of the world on a rail of cocaine. 

The songs range from electronic to a more acoustic arrangement.  My Superman and Starstruck make me remeniscsent of Siouxsie Sioux. Lights Out is syrupy sweet indie goodness.  Unstoppable, You’ll Find A Way and Creator give M.I.A. a run for her money.  

This album is good medicine, a quench to my musical cottonmouth. I’m eating it up. Drop everything you’re doing right now, and devour.

Here are some tracks that haven’t already been posted to rapology before:

Lights Out
Starstruck
My Superman
Unstoppable

Snowboarding has been my calling since December began and my friends see less of me than my snowboard does, unless they are accomplices in my insatiable lust for powder.  Everything else has fallen by the wayside, including keeping this blog updated.

I’ve been on a techno bent this winter and one gem of recent discovery for me is Burial.  There’s not a lot of information available about the man behind the music. He remains anonymous and claims that only five people know what he does.

The music is very dark and hypnotic. I love the all-consuming bass and mixture of melodic R&B type vocal samples. Metacritic named Untrue the best album of 2007, so it must be worth a listen!

Archangel
Near Dark
Etched Headplate

Elizabeth Goodman of Rolling Stone did a much better job of reviewing Santogold than I will. The blog, which I developed for rollingstone.com, is worth following. It’s focused on breaking artists in the music industry. Despite Rolling Stone’s orientation towards mainstream pop culture, the writers for this blog have a good pulse on the underground.

My own 2 cents:
* Santi is very experimental with her voice. I think of Tori Amos and Erykah Badu when I hear it.
* Maybe their sound is a bit like MIA, but it is much more menacing. 

The music:
You’ll Find a Way
Creator - Freq nasty + Santogold
Shove it

Discovering Booka Shade last year made me realize that innovation in techno was still possible.  Infact, I loved their album “Movements” so much that it made my top ten albums of 2006 list.

I think the Germans have techno pegged.  Booka Shade is a duo out of Frankfurt.  Partners in crime Walter Merziger and Arno Kammermeier founded Get Physical Records in 2002, and made their first big mark on the scene with their 2005 single, Body Language.

Booka Shade has recently released two singles.  Their sound seems to be going in a minimal direction, but still not lacking in the beauty that makes them stand apart from all other techno artists. 

From the new singles:
Karma Car
Numbers (Extended Vocal Mix)

My favorites from Movements:
Wasting Time - my number one favorite
Body Language
Night Falls

Mophono was the first Pandora recommendation to really catch me. This duo sprang from San Francisco with their debut release “I Cry” in 2004. They have yet to produce another album, but I’m hoping it’s shortly in the wings.

I Cry traverses many different musical styles. The tracks range from hip hop to downtempo to IDM. In them, I hear influences of DJ Shadow, Aphex Twin, Booka Shade, Four Tet and maybe even a little Wax Tailor.

Idiom Creek Remix
Lily
I Cry
Shredding

I’ve posted the album in its entirety for those of you who are interested. It won’t take much digging for you to find it.

This last track falls outside of everything else I’ve heard from them. You can find it on the Golden Gate Breaks compilation. Here’s to feeling free, and many joyous days to come.

Sun Power

Christ all-mighty, I’m stumped.  Wax Tailor’s music embodies so many things to gush about that I don’t even know where to begin.  I have to give all the credit to Jason (and dude’s got some street cred, yo) for turning me on to him.

His tracks possess both elements of hip hop and downtempo. I haven’t heard someone do this so well since DJ Cam was at his peak in the late 90s. The music is haunting. It echoes, resonates, churns. He uses a lot of samples from old movies, which only enhance its malefic sound. If they aren’t samples, he constructs them well enough to have me absolutely fooled into thinking they are.

His new album, Hope & Sorrow, is ridden with flirtatious female vocals and a few tracks with great hip hop flow. Although I like it tremendously, I find it a little less varied and original than Tales of the Forgotten Melodies. I’ve posted tracks from both albums for your enjoyment because though they are very different animals, they are both gems.

Hope & Sorrow:
The Man With No Soul
Positively Inclined - ft. ASM & Marina Quaisse
House of Wax - ft. The Others

Tales of the Forgotten Melodies:
Que Sera
Hypnosis Theme - ft Marina Quaisse
How I Feel

Glitch is the perfect marriage of hip hop and breaks. It appeals to me because I’m a jaded old raver turned hip hop fanatic. It satisfies my liking for two genres at once, in a no nonsense sort of way. Glitch is muddy, chunky, sexy and relentless.  It requires a lot of effort from the listener because it’s texture rich, and the landscape of the tracks change a lot. Don’t even bother if you don’t have a good woofer or a good pair of headphones.

There have been two great glitch releases of note in the past month from Modeselektor and edIT.  I heard this genre for the first time at Burning Man in 2006, and lost my head on the dancefloor to a Bassnectar set.  These days, I love listening to it, but it tends to be too slow for me on the dance floor. To my disappointment, Bassnectar has failed to impress me each time I’ve seen him since that night on the playa, even at Burning Man this year.

Another recent release of note is a remix album from Kraddy.  It’s mostly old material, but you get the full tracks, as opposed to snippets of them like in the sets posted to his site. I like him the best of the bunch because his beats tend to be a lot more high energy.

Modeselektor:
Hyper Hyper
The dark side of the sun - ft. puppetmastaz

edIT:
Artsy Remix - ft. The Grouch
Sunshine (Mos Def) - this isn’t new but I thought I’d post it

Kraddy:
The Next Episode (Dr Dre & Snoop Dogg)
Forgot About Dre (Dr Dre & Eminem)

Kraddy also does a great remix of Get Yer Freak On by Missy Elliot. If anyone knows where to find that track unmixed, let me know.

Today was a big day in new music releases with Bjork, Travis, Dj Jazzy Jeff, and Sage Francis (to name a few) all puting out albums. So far, most of it disappoints, including the long awaited Sage Francis album, Human the Death Dance.

The one that really caught my attention was DJ Kentaro’s new release, Enter. The 16 track debut album features artists Pharcyde and Spank Rock, among some others less notable.

Personally, I enjoy the standalone tracks more. The beats are blunt and chaotic, but it all comes together in the end.

solo:
One Hand Blizzard - this is the roller, so turn it up.
Enter the Newground
Grateful To You

collabs:
Keep On - featuring the Pharcyde
Free - featuring Spank Rock

In the spirit of Junkie XL’s upcoming performance at the Heavens tonight, I decided to research this artist and buff up on my knowledge a bit before the show.  My first introduction to Junkie XL was recent, with his release of Music from SSX Blur.

Today I downloaded a few of his albums, dating back to Saturday Teenage Kick released in 1998.  What I want to know is, how did I miss Junkie XL?!  In 1998, I was on the cutting edge of electronic music.  Atleast, I thought I was.  This album is full of big beats akin that of the Chemical Brothers and Crystal Method.  It’s quality stuff that I wish was part of my collection a long time ago.

Billy Club
100 - You’ll have to forgive the sketchy quality of this track.  I downloaded the special edition of Saturday Teenage Kick and thought it was too good not to post. If anyone has a better copy, give me a shout.

Some newer stuff:

L’Envers
Today
Cortina D’Amprezzo