The Audiozine

Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed Los Angeles, Flying Lotus's debut LP. It might have been the only thing I listened to from Jan 2009-Feb 2009 until Merriweather Post Pavilion started owning my iPod. But after watching DJ Shadow and Prefuse 73 both kinda fizzle out a bit after some initially very bright efforts, I kinda assumed that Flying Lotus would be another gifted instrumental hip-hop producer who would nail down a unique style and then get boxed in by it within one or two albums. But his latest LP, Cosmogramma, lays waste to those fears. Tons of live instrumentation, much more diverse rhythmic source material, fuller and lusher production, without any trace of abandoning his original style. Proof? The fact that he was able to pull off this collaboration with one of the new jams (featuring some interpolated J Dilla in the coda as well):

Miguel Atwood-Ferguson Ensemble "Drips/Take Notice" feat Flying Lotus from Miguel Atwood-Ferguson on Vimeo.

Again, maybe he'll end up like Prefuse (whose 2nd LP was also his highwater mark), but in the meantime let's enjoy the ride.

Suf's on a roll; what was all that jive about writer's block? New dubby flavors. Old cherub-enhanced arrangements. All: raise their hands.

FACT: Kingdom = You.

WAKEUPWAKEUPWAKEUPWAKEUPWAKEUPWAKEUPWAKEUPWAKEUP.

Follow-up to my (maybe overly harsh) prior post on jazz coverage in p4k: Toast!

Sunday Brunch: Ducktails from Ray Concepcion on Vimeo.

This live Ducktails video reminds me of 1990's suburban life: hanging out at friends' houses, going to the park to play soccer or walk around, driving at least 20 minutes to get anywhere, having nowhere to go late at night, playing around with melodic loops for hours at a time. Real Estate weigh in with similar evocations here.

These guys and some of the other lo-fi bands proliferating recently had initially left me kinda cold. I'm still not partial to all of this stuff, but the weirdly subliminal quality of the Ducktails material is fascinating and the Daytrotter session in the above link proves that when the lo-fi murk is scrubbed off Real Estate, they've got some strong songwriting and sterling guitar interplay at their disposal.

The song "Nobody" was made famous by the minstrel-show comedian Bert Williams. That is, popular and controversial — Williams was an African-American blackface vaudeville performer. "Nobody" was his signature song, something of a hit in 1906.

"The way we play it is, we try to ... consider the song a punching bag, in a lot of ways," he says. "And we really kind of throw it around. And sometimes what I will say to an audience, after they hear it, they think, 'Oh, it's such a nice ditty.' Like, this is an old minstrel song. It kind of changes the vibe about how they hear it again, or how they can remember hearing it."

Yay, a largely positive album review on an influential site that ostensibly should be reaching forward-thinking listeners though at times seems to be a forum for lowbrows pretending to be highbrows while struggling to maintain middlebrow humility! Anyway, thanks Joe Tangari for pushing these sounds, judging by the personnel involved I'm guessing that this is a killer set.

Riposte #1 -- taking Pitchfork to task for both undercoverage and underhyping good stuff.

and

Riposte #2 -- taking old fogeys in the jazz community to task for thinking that young listeners in the internet age (i.e. yrs truly) can't engage a close listen from time to time. I'd actually argue that jazz (and plenty of other music across the rock/experimental/electronic/dance/etc spectra) give us a respite from the constant onslaught of online media; at the same time, those online media give us unprecedented access to deep listening from way further under the radar than print/broadcast media used to afford. Win+Win = WinWin.

01. Original Brew

02. Golden Age

03. Invades Blue Note

04. Historicity

On My Mind.