Jayson Brothers - The Game

This one was released about this time last year by Jayson Brothers, one of Motor City Drum Ensembles many aliases, nothing flash in terms of sonic trickery or none of that. But the sample hook is what makes this, forever a sucker for cut up soul.

Jayson Brothers - The Game by invrs

The Primmers - You're Gonna Get Done

Picked this one off the AK79 compilation, a collection of NZ Punk tracks from the late 70's.
Got that 2tone/ska vibe but with a more hori kiwi sensibilty.

THE RUCKAZOID - RRRRAP

Original beats/acapellas/mix/cuts/whatever from The Ruckazoid aka Ricci Rucka, turntable extrodinaire (yup same dude who released Crush off All City last year) . This has been around for over half a decade now but shit is heat still.

A few words from the man himself...

I made this record in early 2005. At the time, I realized that Hip Hop was less about wordplay, and more about talking to a beat, while at the same time, the backbone of hip hop, lost it's backbone to the laptop. Skill development is no where to be found.

Hip hop, like politics, only has a handful of flavors, and a group of subscribers of each. Gangster, South, Westcoast, Hipster, Underground, and a few more. This is what's left, if you don't fall into this, you are NOT "hip hop". The artform I fell in love with, changed, very much, and it's an empty shell.

RRRRAP is an ode to a dying culture, and my last offering to hip hop in a format that is recognize as "hip hop".

ONE
RUCKAZOID

Doug Hream Blunt Interview

A wee while back I posted up Mr Blunt's "Gentle Persuasion", since then I've copped the vinyl and CD, watched the video's and wondered why so many talented mutherfuckers go unnoticed. Just the way it is I guess. Anyways, Mr Pepperell (who now has a tumblr) took the liberty of shedding more light on the man, who seems like personification of the Californian lifestyle. Thanks bro.

“Yes, this is Doug Blunt! Who is this?”
Speaking down the line from San Francisco, Doug Hream Blunt literally can’t understand a word I’m saying. To be fair though, he has probably never had a phone call from New Zealand before. The loud background noise of a TV set playing and several children running rampage around the house isn’t helping either. For a moment I consider abandoning ship. “Oh, you’re from New Zealand right?” says Blunt, speaking with a tone which makes me realise he knows exactly who I am and why I’m calling.

Whist speaking with this highly underrated San Francisco singer and musician, this sort of dichotomy characterises all. With an accent which mixes American and Caribbean, Blunt will swing from having no idea what I’m saying, to connecting completely with my questions, in the process displaying an amazing degree of enthusiasm. On the other side of the scale, he’ll just as quickly disconnect from me, slowly trailing off with his sentences. And as someone familiar with his highly prized musical output, every answer or reaction sits perfectly with his sound.

I first became aware of Blunt’s work while trawling the internet for a Dam Funk remix of an Ariel Pink song. Googling both artist’s names together, the first entry to come up was a blog post in the Line Out Section of thestranger.com. Titled ‘Dam-Funk X Ariel Pink = Doug Hream Blunt’, writer Dave Segal’s post included a YouTube link to ‘Gentle Persuasion’. An incredible song, ‘Gentle Persuasion’ blends the hazy lo-fi aesthetic Ariel Pink has become associated with, with the early eighties boogie funk/RnB feels often connected to Dam Funk; evening throwing some carribbean/tropical touches in for good measure. I was absolutely floored over by this waking dream of a tune. Faded as hell, the song sees Blunt alternate between singing macked out sexual innuendos and noodling away on his guitar. The sort of player who goes so out of key on his solos that he actually comes back into key, Blunt is aptly supported by some super beached keyboards, strutting bass, snappy drums and a gorgeous female backing vocal.

Completely captured by ‘Gentle Persuasion’, after some specific digging, I made contact with Blunt’s LA based label, OT Records and Fun. Through them I purchased copies of both Blunt’s 12inch ‘Gentle Persuasion’ record and a CD album of the same name. OT Records and Fun also put me onto a series of video clips on vimeo.com. Taken from CITYVISIONS, a public access TV channel in San Francisco, the three incredible clips show Blunt and what looks like a band of high school music students syncing along to three of Blunt’s songs: ‘Ride The Tiger’, ‘Love Land’ and ‘Caribbean Queen’. The clips are incredible, easily some of the most amazing examples of a hypnagogic state I’ve ever seen.

Rocking a mini-afro, slender black aviator shades and a cream suit, Blunt holds down guitar and vocals. His band consists of a white girl with big hair and blue denim jeans on guitar, another white chick with a cowboy hat and a leather jacket on keys, what appears to be an Indian woman in a lime shirt on bass, a funny little bearded guy on vibraphone and a spiky haired guy in a striped blue shirt on drums. Backed by a black backdrop, and positioned on a blue stage, in reference to Hypnagogic states, all three videos have a weird quality to them which makes you think they might not actually be real. It’s kind of like the sci-fi/fantasy story trope about the shop weird shop you visit once and get a gremlin from. The strange shop you can’t ever find again and seems to have been replaced by a brick wall. I was obsessed and I needed to know more.

Juggling talking with me on the phone with entertaining his three children (“They really are a handful,” he says with a happy sigh), Blunt slowly lets me in on the best kept secret that is his back story. The facts are interspersed with constant laughter and a reoccurring sense of disbelief that someone from New Zealand is talking to him on the phone. “I was born in Arkansas originally, but I came to San Francisco when I was younger, when I was seven,” he says, after repeating my question about where he is from back to himself several times. This parroted verbal repetition is a habit he displays throughout our interview.

While his parents were music lovers, they didn’t play any musical instruments themselves. That was something Blunt would have to pick up for himself later in life. Still, between them and the rest of the people on his street, he had the love of music drilled into him from young. ” I was raised in this poor neighbourhood in San Francisco,” he passionately reflects, placing emphasis on the word “poor”. “The only thing we had to do was listen to music. You know? It was really poor. You couldn’t go outside and stuff. All you could do was just listen to music. It was funny. I got addicted to it.” Raised on RnB and Rock and Roll, Blunt quickly became a record collector. As he puts it, in a very matter of fact way, “I was of that generation, so I collected, you know? I collected a lot of vinyl cause I was of that generation.”
Name-checking The Whispers and Jimi Hendrix (a name he will come back to later), Blunt had been playing guitar and singing for, in his words, “six or seven years,” when he hooked up with a young studio owner named Victor Flaviani to record at his Flaviani Recording Studios in San Francisco. As to when exactly this occurred however, Blunt is close to blank. The best he can hazard is sometime in the late 90s. “Victor [Flaviani] was a music teacher,” Blunt happily recalls. He had a music workshop so he was able to do the album for me in there.”
As to why he wanted to record a record at the time, Blunt is just as faded as he is with exact dates. “I don’t know why man? I have no idea?” he laughs. What he does remember though, is he recorded it in less than a week. “Victor was new to studio work,” Blunt says. “Since he was new, he didn’t ask a lot. And I didn’t ask a lot, cause I didn’t know a lot,” he explains, trailing off with a giggle. In terms of his studio band, Blunt teamed up with some musician friends, a couple of Flaviani’s music students, Flaviani’s sisters and even Victor himself on drums. It sounds pretty ad hoc and somewhat slapped together, and it kind of was, but not completely. “I wasn’t just whoever I could get though,” Blunt passionately states. “I felt that they could all do it you know. If I thought you could do it, I let you do it!”

Defining a capable musician as one who, as he puts it after a lot of serious thought, “Can keep a beat and keep the time and knows his chords,” Blunt’s ultimate musical icon is Jimi Hendrix. “I like Jimi Hendrix,” he enthuses with a touch of frustration. “I’ve been trying to get a weird sound like that, but I can’t get it!” “I want to sound like that, but,” seemingly on the verge of a big statement, he just trails off, dropping into silence for a few semi sad moments. Ironically, what Blunt doesn’t seem to realise, yet is constantly ticking over, and occasionally interjecting my questions with his own questions about, is his lionized cult status.

On ‘Gentle Persuasion’, an album inspired by, like he explains, “the life experiences of living all over California,” Blunt and his ragtag band of players throw down a series of seven fundamentally Californian (and cross-genre jams). Musically, the record is the sound of spending your whole life in a haze of weed smoke, whiskey and women on the beaches of California. They’re the sort of daydream funk meets glazed over radio rock jams that make doing nothing but staring at the wall all day seem like a pretty cool idea. You can literally feel how much time Blunt must have spent chilling on corners and stoops across the state, taking it all in, one breath at a time. Subconsciously drawing his lyrics from these languid days, Blunt views music as something which just pops out and comes through you. His favourite jam is his tune ‘Wiskey Man’, a tune built around the repeated refrain “I got to be mellow”. And if you ask him where he got his sound from, his answer is simple, and so damn cool. “I got it from California man!”

In terms of what he has done on the live circuit, Blunt is just as vague as he is with recording dates. He mentions having held a few gigs singing and playing guitar at the local hospital. Then there is the CITYVISIONS performance, which in typical Blunt fashion, he has minimal factual memories about and a maximum emotional response. “I don’t know man,” he says, speaking with a special emphasis which makes you realise those televised song were a special moment for him. “It was just something that happened, and I just did it. It was good. It was good to be on TV, and I did it!”

These days, Blunt is a lot more low-profile with the music. He’s a father with a young family. Worryingly though, the major reason he hasn’t been playing is he had a stoke recently. “I’m getting back on my feet, but that took it out of me,” he admits, with an underlying mixture of strength and sadness. “That was a lesson man. It doesn’t really bother me that much though, not now.” Still, as a result he isn’t playing guitar. As a replacement, Blunt has been playing the congas (perhaps an extension of flourishes of tropical feel on his earlier work?) and taking trumpet lessons. Alternating between happy and sad, he makes and amusing and really exciting musical threat. “When I’ve finished studying trumpet I will probably go back to record with Victor Flaviani and try and do some singing behind the trumpet .”

Blunt doesn’t use the internet and as a result is more or less ignorant of his cult artist status and the astronomical prices people attempt to retail copies of his twelve inch record and CD for on the internet. During our conversation I actually get the sense that processing the stories I tell him about the niche interest in his music and the manner in which it presages plenty of contemporary musical trends is probably making it difficult for him to focus on my questions. As alien as the idea is to him, he is very enthusiastic about it. The thing is though, as you can tell from listening to his songs and his earlier comments, he is one hell of a chilled out dude. People find him, he doesn’t find people. Equally, as opposed to seeking out opportunities, opportunity seeks him out. It’s situations like this which have lead to his current arrangement with OT Records and Fun, who have been pumping his CDs and vinyl records out to music lovers across the globe, for a fair, affordable price. Similarly, it’s thanks to OT Records and Fun that I’m able to interview Blunt.

Doug Hream Blunt might be unknown, he might be underrated, and he might even stay that way forever. I get the sense that none of that really matters to Blunt though. He’s made music, played music, has a family and is experiencing a late career resurgence he probably never even imagined would occur. It’s the “well ahead of your time” scenario that so many truly great artists suffer from. Regardless of what happens from here on in, one thing is certain, Doug Hream Blunt is gonna remain chilled out as hell, just like his awesomely casual musical output.
Bottling the essence of everything carefree about California isn’t easy, unless you’re so laid back, you didn’t even have to think about trying. Which in a nutshell is - the Doug Hream Blunt story.
By Martyn Pepperell

If you want to purchase Doug Hream Blunt’s Gentle Persuasion CD or LP, please contact otrecords@hotmail.com

Ice Cream

The good folks that brought you Submarinate are bringing you another stella lineup this Friday.

Don't really need to say much as the flyer says it all. A great lineup of some of the most progressive beat makers in the land. Holla!

Redbull Present: Space Invadas Gig/Workshop

This Thursday evening Space Invadas are in town to perform as well as hold a workshop down Havana. The workshop will talk about this years academy which is to be in Tokyo
(and still is at stage) as well as an interview with Steve Spacek and
Katalyst of Space Invada's.

From 9pm onwards we'll have our very own Dan Aikido, Rio Hemopo,
EWH Soundsystem and Julien Dyne performing as well as Space Invada's
and their 5-piece band.

The workshop is free with the gig costing $15+bf. A good chance for those interesting in applying for Redbull this year as well as checking some fresh sounds.

MMM.... Doom

One of the most interesting and elusive men in Hip Hop, MF DOOM aka King Geedorah aka Viktor Vaughn began his carrer as "Zev Love X" he formed KMD who were signed on Elektra records. Releasing the album "Mr hood" in 1991



Over the next two decades DOOM has done so much in all sorts of directions.
Working solo or with such artists as MF Grim, DangerMouse and Madlib.



Doom is in town tonight at the SFBH, tomorrow he plays FU/ZEN in Auckland.
Go check this cat, One of the greatest MC's of all time.

Help Out Japan Pt.2

Nihon Kizuna have also put together a compilation of heavyweight artist in support as well. Available 18th March (tomorrow).

http://www.nihonkizuna.com/buy/

Help Out Japan Pt.1

Last month NZ was hit with one of it's worst natural disasters and now as you would have seen Japan needs a hand.. Finest Ego have put together a compilation "The Sun Still Rises In The East" in aid of the situation over there. Don't know if the embed player is working right so if not then hit up the link hurrr.

R.I.P. Nate Dogg

Ain't nobody can fuck with Nate's gangsta croon.

I was quietly hoping he would come back and show all these busta's how to make a hook.

R.I.P homie, we blazin' for you.

Mosca

A little midweek madness goin' down tomorrow night at the San Francisco Bath House. Night Slug's Mosca is in the place with a whole heap of Wellington's finest throwing down for Ghetto Box on Blast's first gig. If your in the area holla down, should be a dope night with yours truly "hosting", that should be a laugh in itself.

Tickets here ($15 2 for 1 ticket online)

Bloggers Delight 2

As the seasons change we at the Hip Drop thought it was time for another collection of freebies. Grab the second collection in the "Bloggers Delight" series.


01 Mar - 2u4u
02 Mndsgn - Flybutter ft. Michael Jackson
03 KeithCharles - Nu Shit ft. J-Coop
04 Pac Div - Take Me High
05 Ivory Keyes - Temptation
06 MED - Where I'm From feat. Kurupt & Aloe Blacc
07 Dom Kennedy - Playas Punch
08 Ta'raach - Lemonade(Guru Mix)
09 Elaquent - Noir
10 Jacque Polynice - Obama O's(Mike Slott Remix)
11 Take - Horizontal Figuration (Tokimonsta Remix)
12 B.Lewis - Choice Two - Leave
13 heRobust - Shawty Swing My Way (Busted)
14 Beatbully - Kosmisk Regn
15 Shlohmo - Places
16 Trailer Limon - Call To Me
17 Nite Jewel - It Goes Through Your Head (Dam-Funk Clubdub)
18 Jeeks - Nightcap
19 Round Table Knights - Say What feat Ogris Debris (Ogris Debris Version)
20 J.Rocc - Tribute To Malcom McLaren
21 Débruit's - Débruit's Pony
22 Busta Rhymes - Dangerous(Slugabed Remax)

Deep House Mix - Nick Soto

New Wellington resident, Sydney expat Nick drop'd us off a mix. Enjoy

Deep House Mix - Nick Soto

Scratch 22 - Death Is The Dancer

Scratch 22 layin' the heavy on ya for this instrumental version of a Jay Roacher track. Reminds me a little of the vibe the Beastie's were on with the last album. Anyways be sure to check out his Soundcloud for more heat.Death is the Dancer by Scratch22

Ben Jamin" x -Y∆HN LøÔK∑ PIc∆RD - Seoul 85

Ben Jamin" has been puttin' in work for a wee while now. He has just featured on the latest Finest Ego NZ/Aus compilation and I'm sure he's got some more freshness coming our ways this year. I'm glad I've FINALLY gotten round to posting some stuff of his up. Keep em coming cuz.

Ben Jamin" x Y∆HN LøÔK∑ PIc∆RD - Seoul 85 by Ben Jamin''

Sub Marinate

If your in the area tomorrow night (11th March, Tugboat, Wellington) come down and check some sounds from the homies. Pretty hype lineup.

Numero Eccentric Breaks & Beats Compilation 2

Shouts to ever reliable Numero (and xlr8r for puttin' me on) who are hooking up this selection of breaks for free.

Eccentric Breaks & Breaks, Volume 2 by Numero

Che Grand - ZFTP VIII: Uche The Great

Heres a nice mixtape from Che Grand


http://chegrand.bandcamp.com/album/zftp-viii-uche-the-great

We Love DJ Kool Herc

"We at Saturn Never Sleeps emailed our friends to put this compilation together – We Love DJ Kool Herc is our way of saying thank you for his contributions to music & culture."

More OFWGKTA

Lot's of people hating but this shit is gold. Tyler doing Yonkers on piano



Also Toro Y Moi flipped Odd Futures "FRENCH" get it here

Possessed By Paul James - Take Off Your Mask

Rollin' out the week with this number from Possessed by Paul James.

Good insight into the man himself over at Voodoo Rhythm.

James Brown - Sho Is Funky Down Here

Have been revisiting some wax that I haven't played in a while. This LP has a bit more of a rock tinge than straight funk, more like Sly meets The MG's steez than what we're used to hearing from James & Co but diggin' that's for sure. I've read a few bad reviews here and there but to be honest I don't really know what they're goin' on about.

Soul-I-Darity

Marek and Dan Aikido go head to head down Bettys.

Get down if your in the area, sure to be a funky affair.

TightMike

Dope beatmaker from Vancouver by the name of TightMike. Go get his offering "Bobbin&Weavin"
Came across this at Doin Work

Wajeed - 1st of May

Here's an oldie but goodie that I find myself droppin still. Be sure to check out Jeedo's soundcloud for more dope free shit.

jeedo beats: 1st of May by jeedo47

Lorn

Lorn touches down in Wellington tomorrow (3rd March) at The San Francisco Bath House. Here's an interview from Martyn Pepperell to give a little insight on the man himself...

Lorn: desolate, forlorn, abandoned.

Words… Words have power, words have meaning. And for a young Marcos Ortega, at age nine, already a world weary wanderer of America, the word Lorn, the nickname turned performance moniker (by which he identifies himself to his day) represented the start of something new.

As he explains via phone, early one evening in January, “I remember sitting in my mother’s chair in the living room, this really old uncomfortable, dirty, coarse chair… I had come to the realisation that my father hadn’t been around. Marcos is a very Mexican name and my other family is German. I guess it was my little bit of youth rebellion, just saying fuck Marcos, I’m coming up with my own name. At first I didn’t think it meant anything, like I don’t think Dave means anything. I just thought it was a name. I just liked it, so I kept it. Then, when I got older, you know, the friends I had and I made, they called me Lorn. When I was a teenager, I looked it up, and I was like; holy shit. It just fit with my upbringing, and where I was at, because I was always moving as a child. So I didn’t really have a home, or a specific family member that I was living with, so it just fit.”

A lifelong music lover who caught the bug for DJing and electronic music production in his early teens, Ortega was raised across America by a single mother with a penchant for drug and alcohol abuse who had DJ boyfriends coming in and out of her life as much as she moved cities (by age fifteen Ortega had lived in a dozen cities) as well as his grandparents and aunt, who all took turns looking after him. Describing some of his earliest memories as dancing to mixtapes collected off his mother’s boyfriends, Ortega’s childhood was filled with classic hip-hop, pop and rock. And while as he puts it, “I never really felt like I had a real home or place I belonged,” Ortega could always invent things in his mind. Which in this scenario manifested as, as he puts it, “My ideas of music and my ideas of relationships and friendships. What it meant to be a man. How a man should be. How a family should be, things like that.”

Exposed in Chicago at age thirteen to the anarchistic drill’n’bass labyrinths of English electronica innovator Aphex Twin and the Black Atlantis imagining techno of Drexciya, Ortega’s mind was blown by the possibilities of sampler and synthesiser powered electronic music. Picking up turntablism in a friends basement, Ortega obsessively scratched over classic electro breakdance records, taught himself keys on his grandparents ancient piano and disappeared into a secret universe of computer program and sampler based music creation. ” I was just messing around, ” he laughs. A thirteen year old kid just suddenly discovers all of this shit, and I was hooked.”

At some point in the early 2000s, Ortega surfaced as a central figure in an internet chat room centralised community of turntablists, who would download his free-for-use darkly textured half-time beat loops and utilize them in their scratch DJ routines. ” It seemed like people all over the world were interested in these beats and it sort of gave me a little bit of a following,” he recalls. “It wasn’t electro, it wasn’t hip-hop, to me it was something else. I think other people caught onto that.”

From here things get murky for a few years. An aborted attempt to live in New York here. A dubstep sounding scratch record released in Paris there. Radio support on Triple R 102.7FM (Melbourne, Australia) on a tangential tip. Connections with DJ/Producer figures like NOSAJ THING, The Gaslamp Killer and eventually Brainfeeder Record’s Afrofuturist architect Flying Lotus, who with a single album release would change everything for Ortega. Throw depression, anger, thoughts of suicide and his grandparents house in Wisconsin (a locale he describes as, “by a big lake out in the middle of nowhere”) into the mix and you have a reductionist road map to Nothing Else, his Brainfeeder released debut album; at that stage intended to be his last. He explains, “After I failed in New York I moved up north to my grandparents in Wisconsin. I guess once I got there it kind of gave me time to reflect on everything and really get down to what I gave a shit about, and that was Nothing Else.”

Thickly textured in melody and atmosphere and richly detailed in rhythm, Nothing Else is future b-boy music for a dystopian Blade Runner world which hasn’t quite arrived yet, and concurrently, a personal response to John Milton’s cult 17th century poem Paradise Lost. Coloured by a re-occurring sound and energy Ortega defines as “this whole idea of conflict,” due to his low mental state at the time, Ortega put everything into the record, seeing it as both the alpha and omega of his career. “Nothing Else meant that this was all there was ever going to be for me, you know?” he admits with an ironic laugh. “It was some sort of existential piece of music.”

These days, Ortega, the desolate, abandoned Lorn, exists in a new location. A location where, as during his struggles he continues to do the only thing he has ever really done, make music. However, as opposed to a place destitute, Ortega now works from the vantage point of one who has embraced the wider world, been embraced back and has that ever important extra bit of spare cash in his pocket when his unconventional working week is done. “I’ve been in a few magazines and I’ve been approached to do music for film,” he enthuses, baffled. “I’ve been around the world practically; and now I can pay my rent.” Pausing for a moment, he repeats his words with a grateful emphasis and an extra, down to earth phrase to boot. “I can pay my rent! Feed my cat!”

By Martyn Pepperell

Nomade Radio: In New Zealand w/ Christoph El Truento

In New Zealand With: Christop El Truento by Nomade Radio on Mixcloud

Shouts to Thierry & Nomade Radio for the sentiments and shedding more light on what's going on in NZ "scene". Don't forget to hit up the latest Finest Ego compilation below if you haven't done so and are diggin' the sounds.

Back in January with a New Zealand episode (which is very special as the country strugglin with the damages of an earthquake) including a great mix from Auckland based producer Christoph El Truento who's defintely someone to watch.Plus music from Julien Dyne, Benny Tones, Sir Froderick, Lisa Preston aka LP, and more. This one is dedicaced to all the people there. I Hope all of you guys and your families are well.

Peace.

"T"