Action Bronson | Actin’ Crazy (Produced by 40)

Action Bronson shows now slowing down this year with the release of his new track "Actin' Crazy," which will be on his highly anticipated album Mr. Wonderful. Produced by Drake's in-house beat-man Noah "40" Shebib, Bronson details as to why he's "out here acting crazy" over some slow-release synths and boom bap drums.



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HouseShoes Presents | The Gift Volume 10 | DRUGS BEATS

Houseshoes drops the final installment of “The Gift” series. Volume 10.



"It's been a minute.
But I'm back at it again with the final installment of The Gift series.
DRUGS BEATS hails from North Carolina and has had placements with 50 Cent, Ludacris, Lloyd Banks, Big Boi and many more.
Enjoy, and get ready for 2015.
Street Corner Music has MAD shit on deck for y'all..."

-Shoes

Oyinda | Restless

New York based singer/songwriter/producer Oyinda made her official EP debut this week with the release of Before the Fall. “Each song explores the bittersweet aspects of experience. It marks the moment when I realized I had changed,” Oyinda told Billboard. Of the four tracks on the self-produced EP, “Restless” is the only one we hadn’t previously heard, and feels both timeless and vital as it vividly details feelings of anxiety and fear. Amidst rapid drums and thunderous guitars, the 22-year-old observes “Your mind is restless,/You’re feeling anxious,/You’re running rapid into the dark of your eyes.” With imagistic lines and a storm-like production of winding synths and echoes, “Restless” further proves Oyinda is a highly gifted lyricist with a great ear for palpable, darkly vibrant sounds. Listen to the song below, which premiered on Billboard. Before the Fall is available to purchase on iTunes and stream on Spotify now. Oyinda performs this Saturday, November 15th, at Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn. Follow Oyinda on facebook, twitter, and soundcloud.

Dj Lean Rock X Cha Cha | Rebel

Peep that new Lean Rock!

The Franklys | What You Said | OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO

Fankly speaking, it works.

Hailing from all corners of the globe (well, Europe and North America) London based four piece The Franklys only emerged at the beginning of this year. Yet their naughty, contagious take on garage rock has already seen the quartet sell out the 100 Club before heading back out on the road for more.

Live, the band are a blur of lipstick, rock hard riffs and attitude, with The Franklys coming across as four female Holden Caulfields in the process.

New single ‘What You Said’ is out on Monday (October 13th) and comes accompanied with a video shot – rather incongruously – in the fields of Merry Olde England. It sorta works, though – check it out below.

SBTRKT ft. Denai Moore | The Light

Just a few days since UK electronic producer SBTRKT released his song "Look Away," he has shared another cut from his upcoming Wonder Where We Land in the form of "The Light."

Featuring Denai Moore, the song sports ominous synth tones and click-clacking drum machines. Moore's layered vocals sweeten the simmering soundscape somewhat, particularly when the melodies flourish during the choruses.

Wonder Where We Land drops on October 7 via Young Turks



Taken from the new album WONDER WHERE WE LAND.
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Pre-order deluxe: po.st/sbtrktdeluxe

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The Soul Rebels & Joey Bada$$ | Pay Tribute To Michael Brown w/ "Hardknock" LIVE

New Orleans' legendary brass band The Soul Rebels performed live with Joey Bada$$ at Brooklyn Bowl Friday August 15, 2014. Full story: http://bit.ly/JoeyRebels





Watch the full event recap here: http://youtu.be/AjJIfdgqp70



Producers: Noah Meisner + Allison Swank
Videographers: Thomas Beckner + Victoria Ng
Editor: Victoria NG

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Working 9-foot TR-909 drum machine goes on display

9ft-909 – Initial sound check from RAY on Vimeo.

Find out how this oversized beatbox works.

It has a big sound, and Roland’s TR-909 drum machine has certainly left a large sonic footprint on the history of electronic music, so it’s perhaps appropriate that Edinburgh-based arts collective Ray is celebrating 30 years of the instrument by creating an oversized 9-foot replica.

Six times the size of the original, this playable sculpture, designed by project leader Brendan McCarthy, has a tensile steel and aluminium frame supporting a wooden outer shell. It can be assembled and taken apart in minutes, but is said to be tough enough to take a beating.

The guts of the machine, which were assembled by Sam Healy (of psych-rock groups North Atlantic Oscillation and Sand), recreate part of the original 909’s interface using off-the-shelf Roland gear. There are a dozen PD-8 drum trigger pads fitted under the spring-loaded buttons, which feed into a TD-12 drum brain.



This in turn sends MIDI data to an Aira TR-8. When interacted with, the sculpture not only pounds out 909 sounds via the TR-8, but also relays the MIDI data to a projection system synchronised to the beat. The more complex the rhythm, the more intricate the visuals.

The result, according to Ray is: “A hands-on behemoth wired for sound and vision. An interactive monument to electronic music.”

The 9-foot 909 is appearing at this weekend’s Green Man festival, and will also be at Bestival on 4 to 7 September. You can see it in action in the video above.

Niani | Sassouma Kouyaté | Jose Marquez Remix | Basic Fingers

Available now on vinyl here:
www.juno.co.uk/products/sassouma…etu-ep/536669-01/

M.I.A. | Gold

Dutch DJ duo the Partysquad contributed production to M.I.A.’s Matangi, and now they’ve aligned again for a song on The Partysquad Summer Mixtape 2014. It’s a typically noisy M.I.A. track that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on Kala, with a beat that remains spacious despite busy drum programming and various agitated blasts of sound. It almost reminds me of “Turn Down For What,” though the recent radio hit Maya interpolates here is Sage The Gemini’s “Gas Pedal.” Get into it below.

Knox Brown | Harry's Code

You should never judge a book by how many superstars it’s written songs for, but with new artist Knox Brown’s star-studded roll call of Jay Z, Aloe Blacc and Mary J Blige, it’s almost impossible to look past it.

“They heard my music and wanted to work,” explains the Jamaican-born musician. “I feel so humbled and slightly gassed. This is what I’ve been dreaming of for the longest while!”

The first Knox Brown track to surface explored dreaming, but not necessarily his. In ‘Redemption Song’ he samples Martin Luther King, Muhammad Ali, Louis Farrakhan and Nelson Mandela to construct a powerful, piano-led track with a smooth Marley-inspired vocal hook over a Southern-style hip-hop beat.

“It wasn’t something I had planned, it sort of happened,” admits Knox, “but the message in that song is basically me looking back at the past and learning from these role models, seeing what people go through and still persevere. Out of a bad situation may come inspiration.”

He’s working on a EP now, and recently released another number called ‘Harry’s Code’ online. Where ‘Redemption Song’ felt more like a bite of Knox’s influences and beliefs, this track is a more complete single. He champions seeing music “without barriers”, and it starts off appropriately, like a classic dub cut, before the electric guitars and percussion slip into a funk and soul swagger, emphasising Knox’s lyrical potential and Jamaican English delivery.

“My first real introduction was when I was at a friend’s house,” begins Knox, explaining his musical genesis. “He put this game called Music 2000 in his PlayStation and my addiction for music production was born after seeing how he was making beats. Whilst in Year 10 at school, I made my first mixtape the summer after and sold 20 copies.”

It’s hard to believe, but the Knox Brown story is only just warming up.

Headphone Activist | North End Night Life

Original Sample
Bach - Suite No. 1 in G major

Dios Mio | Stories

​Dios Mio up their game on new single “Stories”, released on 30 June with a launch party to follow at London’s Old Blue Last on 4 July.

After the band introduced themselves with a couple of raw but highly promising demos last year, the London quartet are back with their full debut release this summer.

In a marked progression, Dios Mio benefit from warm, rounded production on “Stories”, which sees that their brand of grunge-tinged pop is effortlessly accentuated.

What’s more, built on a rigid rhythm section in which the drums and distorted bass allow for a brash intro, the melodic swells of guitar combined with Helena Coan’s delicate vocal means that “Stories” is perhaps a more diverse song than it might initially appear.

Kero One x D'Angelo | Spanish Joint | Remix

Thanks to Kero One, the already beautiful “Spanish Joint” gets pimped and polished into this upbeat and sunshine-y new remix.

Questlove Pens Essay On | How Hip-Hop Failed Black America

QuestLove is a man of many talents. As The Roots' drummer and a professor at New York University, he is also recognized as a scholar on all-music-everything.

Now, the Philly native has scribed a series of six essays that focus on "hip-hop's recent past, thinking about its distant past, and wondering about the possibility of a future" on Vulture.

In this week's essay, Quest conquers the topic, "When the People Cheer: How Hip-Hop Failed Black America", contemplating through ink how Black music's mainstream reach feels like a strange victory.

"Once hip-hop culture is ubiquitous, it is also invisible," he writes. "Once it’s everywhere, it is nowhere. What once offered resistance to mainstream culture (it was part of the larger tapestry, spooky-action style, but it pulled at the fabric) is now an integral part of the sullen dominant."

Read his piece here.



When the People Cheer: How Hip-Hop Failed Black America
By Questlove

This is the first in a weekly series of six essays looking at hip-hop's recent past, thinking about its distant past, and wondering about the possibility of a future.

There are three famous quotes that haunt me and guide me though my days. The first is from John Bradford, the 16th-century English reformer. In prison for inciting a mob, Bradford saw a parade of prisoners on their way to being executed and said, “There but for the grace of God go I.” (Actually, he said “There but for the grace of God goes John Bradford,” but the switch to the pronoun makes it work for the rest of us.) The second comes from Albert Einstein, who disparagingly referred to quantum entanglement as “spooky action at a distance.” And for the third, I go to Ice Cube, the chief lyricist of N.W.A., who delivered this manifesto in “Gangsta Gangsta” back in 1988: “Life ain’t nothing but bitches and money.

Those three ideas may seem distant from one another, but if you set them up and draw lines between them, that’s triangulation. Bradford’s idea, of course, is about providence, about luck and gratitude: You only have your life because you don’t have someone else’s. At the simplest level, I think about that often. I could be where others are, and by extension, they could be where I am. You don’t want to be insensible to that. You don’t want to be an ingrate. (By the by, Bradford’s quote has come to be used to celebrate good fortune — when people say it, they’re comforting themselves with the fact that things could be worse — but in fact, his own good fortune lasted only a few years before he was burned at the stake.)

Einstein was talking about physics, of course, but to me, he’s talking about something closer to home — the way that other people affect you, the way that your life is entangled in theirs whether or not there’s a clear line of connection. Just because something is happening to a street kid in Seattle or a small-time outlaw in Pittsburgh doesn’t mean that it’s not also happening, in some sense, to you. Human civilization is founded on a social contract, but all too often that gets reduced to a kind of charity: Help those who are less fortunate, think of those who are different. But there’s a subtler form of contract, which is the connection between us all.

And then there’s Ice Cube, who seems to be talking about life’s basic appetites — what’s under the lid of the id — but is in fact proposing a world where that social contract is destroyed, where everyone aspires to improve themselves and only themselves, thoughts of others be damned. What kind of world does that create?

Those three ideas, Bradford’s and Einstein’s and Cube’s, define the three sides of a triangle, and I’m standing in it with pieces of each man: Bradford’s rueful contemplation, Einstein’s hair, Ice Cube’s desires. Can the three roads meet without being trivial? This essay, and the ones that follow it, will attempt to find out. I’m going to do things a little differently, with some madness in my method. I may not refer back to these three thinkers and these three thoughts, but they’re always there, hovering, as I think through what a generation of hip-hop has wrought. And I’m not going to handle the argument in a straight line. But don’t wonder too much when it wanders. I’ll get back on track.

* I want to start with a statement: Hip-hop has taken over black music. At some level, this is a complex argument, with many outer rings, but it has a simple, indisputable core. Look at the music charts, or think of as many pop artists as you can, and see how many of the black ones aren’t part of hip-hop. There aren’t many hip-hop performers at the top of the charts lately: You have perennial winners like Jay Z, Kanye West, and Drake, along with newcomers like Kendrick Lamar, and that’s about it. Among women, it’s a little bit more complicated, but only a little bit. The two biggest stars, Beyoncé and Rihanna, are considered pop (or is that pop-soul), but what does that mean anymore? In their case, it means that they’re offering a variation on hip-hop that’s reinforced by their associations with the genre’s biggest stars: Beyoncé with Jay Z, of course, and Rihanna with everyone from Drake to A$AP Rocky to Eminem.

It wasn’t always that way. Back in the late '80s, when I graduated high school, you could count the number of black musical artists that weren’t in hip-hop on two hands — maybe. You had folksingers like Tracy Chapman, rock bands like Living Colour, pop acts like Lionel Richie, many kinds of soul singers — and that doesn’t even contend with megastars like Michael Jackson and Prince, who thwarted any easy categorization. Hip-hop was plenty present — in 1989 alone, you had De La Soul and the Geto Boys and EPMD and Boogie Down Productions and Ice-T and Queen Latifah — but it was just a piece of the pie. In the time since, hip-hop has made like the Exxon Valdez (another 1989 release): It spilled and spread.

So what if hip-hop, which was once a form of upstart black-folk music, came to dominate the modern world? Isn’t that a good thing? It seems strange for an artist working in the genre to be complaining, and maybe I’m not exactly complaining. Maybe I’m taking a measure of my good fortune. Maybe. Or maybe it’s a little more complicated than that. Maybe domination isn’t quite a victory. Maybe everpresence isn’t quite a virtue.

Twenty years ago, when my father first heard about my hip-hop career, he was skeptical. He didn't know where it was all headed. In his mind, a drummer had a real job, like working as music director for Anita Baker. But if I’m going to marvel at the way that hip-hop overcame his skepticism and became synonymous with our broader black American culture, I’m going to have to be clear with myself that marvel is probably the wrong word. Black culture, which has a long tradition of struggling against (and at the same time, working in close collaboration with) the dominant white culture, has rounded the corner of the 21st century with what looks in one sense like an unequivocal victory. Young America now embraces hip-hop as the signal pop-music genre of its time. So why does that victory feel strange: not exactly hollow, but a little haunted?

I have wondered about this for years, and worried about it for just as many years. It’s kept me up at night or kept me distracted during the day. And after looking far and wide, I keep coming back to the same answer, which is this: The reason is simple. The reason is plain. Once hip-hop culture is ubiquitous, it is also invisible. Once it’s everywhere, it is nowhere. What once offered resistance to mainstream culture (it was part of the larger tapestry, spooky-action style, but it pulled at the fabric) is now an integral part of the sullen dominant. Not to mention the obvious backlash conspiracy paranoia: Once all of black music is associated with hip-hop, then Those Who Wish to Squelch need only squelch one genre to effectively silence an entire cultural movement.

And that’s what it’s become: an entire cultural movement, packed into one hyphenated adjective. These days, nearly anything fashioned or put forth by black people gets referred to as “hip-hop,” even when the description is a poor or pointless fit. “Hip-hop fashion” makes a little sense, but even that is confusing: Does it refer to fashions popularized by hip-hop musicians, like my Lego heart pin, or to fashions that participate in the same vague cool that defines hip-hop music? Others make a whole lot of nonsense: “Hip-hop food”? “Hip-hop politics”? “Hip-hop intellectual”? And there’s even “hip-hop architecture.” What the hell is that? A house you build with a Hammer?

This doesn’t happen with other genres. There’s no folk-music food or New Wave fashion, once you get past food for thought and skinny ties. There’s no junkanoo architecture. The closest thing to a musical style that does double-duty as an overarching aesthetic is punk, and that doesn’t have the same strict racial coding. On the one hand, you can point to this as proof of hip-hop’s success. The concept travels. But where has it traveled? The danger is that it has drifted into oblivion. The music originally evolved to paint portraits of real people and handle real problems at close range — social contract, anyone? — but these days, hip-hop mainly rearranges symbolic freight on the black starliner. Containers on the container ship are taken from here to there — and never mind the fact that they may be empty containers. Keep on pushin’ and all that, but what are you pushing against? As it has become the field rather than the object, hip-hop has lost some of its pertinent sting. And then there’s the question of where hip-hop has arrived commercially, or how fast it’s departing. The music industry in general is sliding, and hip-hop is sliding maybe faster than that. The largest earners earn large, but not at the rate they once did. And everyone beneath that upper level is fading fast.

The other day, we ran into an old man who is also an old fan. He loves the Roots and what we do. Someone mentioned the changing nature of the pop-culture game, and it made him nostalgic for the soul music of his youth. “It’ll be back,” he said. “Things go in cycles.” But do they? If you really track the ways that music has changed over the past 200 years, the only thing that goes in cycles is old men talking about how things go in cycles. History is more interested in getting its nut off. There are patterns, of course, boom and bust and ways in which certain resources are exhausted. There are foundational truths that are stitched into the human DNA. But the art forms used to express those truths change without recurring. They go away and don’t come back. When hip-hop doesn’t occupy an interesting place on the pop-culture terrain, when it is much of the terrain and loses interest even in itself, then what?

Back to John Bradford for a moment: I’m lucky to be here. That goes without saying, but I’ll say it. Still, as the Roots round into our third decade, we shoulder a strange burden, which is that people expect us to be both meaningful and popular. We expect that. But those things don’t necessarily work together, especially in the hip-hop world of today. The winners, the top dogs, make art mostly about their own victories and the victory of their genre, but that triumphalist pose leaves little room for anything else. Meaninglessness takes hold because meaninglessness is addictive. People who want to challenge this theory point to Kendrick Lamar, and the way that his music, at least so far, has some sense of the social contract, some sense of character. But is he just the exception that proves the rule? Time will tell. Time is always telling. Time never stops telling.

The Roots | When The People Cheer

The Roots come back to us with a new cut, "When The People Cheer."

It's a good thing when we say that the brand new Roots joint sounds exactly how you would expect a Roots offering to sound like... amazing.

This song will appear on The Roots' next album, …And Then You Shoot Your Cousin. The album will serve as a follow up to their critically acclaimed album, Undun, in that both LP's will be conceptually minded. Meaning all of the tracks will be thematically related, telling a story of sorts as you progress through the album.

It's good to see The Roots back in the studio, as much as we like seeing them on late night TV. Check out the remix of their song, "The Fire," with B.o.B and John Legend on the track.

DJ Fudge | Pedogbepa | Original Mix

Release Date: March 25th, 2014
Purchase Link: http://www.traxsource.com/title/294456/pedogbepa
Label: United Music Records

Kid David | KICK, SNARE, KID.

Kid david teams up with Drummer from FUSIK - Felix, to create a sick lil vid....



Directed: Kid david
Shot : at Blue Motion Studios FL
Edit and Camera : Quan Vu

Instant Low Cost Drum Enhancement | TheRecordingRevolution.com

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Elvis Costello & The Roots | "Wise Up Ghost" | Official Music Video

A simple lyric visual from the Elvis Costello & The Roots collaboration "Wise Up Ghost".