Que Santos?

Matthew Santos that is, referring to my questionable title for this post, is an artist whose name has been popping up all over the place. He was on Lupe Fiasco’s last two albums Food & Liquor as well as this year’s The Cool. Not only does he appear, he appears to be on two of the most stand-out cuts form both albums. The question is, what is this talented folk singer from Chi-town doing on hip hop albums? Well, it seems folk music is still about creativity and Santos is cratively aligning himself for even more work without compromising his unique style. If You heard his songs from Lupe’s album, both “American Terrorist” and “Superstar,” you know his undeniable telent but like me, may not know what his music sounds like. Well here’s a taste…enjoy.

and you can’t remember “Superstar”, here is the video for it…

Heaven or Hell… um I’d Say Heaven

Hey all just to give sight to the sound, I wanted to post this video for Joy Denalane’s hot new single with the Wu-Tang’s Raekwon. For many listeners, the music we play is from artists that may be otherwise obscure. And while it’s cool to hear, it’s also nice to see… so I’m posting this video from the German-born (half-black South African) singer who manages to sing a half dozen styles without sounding bad at all. Good in fact, quite good. Chances are if you’re reading this you’ll agree, either way the video below will help you see…enjoy…

A Recommendation…Little Dragon

Just stopping to check in here on an artists new on the station, Yukimi Nagano and her band Little Dragon. Don’t sleep on this album, it’s called Off The Wall and for more than a few it’s being hailed as an album of the year type of material. And while I think it’s too early in the year to call it, what I’ve heard has been good.

Hailing from the musical hotbed of Gotenburg, Yukimi Nagano originally came to prominence via her much lauded collaboration with Koop, yet another tight, jazz-oriented outfit from Scandanavia. She has gone on to work with people such as Hird, Swell Session and Sleepwalker amongst others, rapidly building a fan base that is instantly captured by her soft, angelic voice and her poignant lyrics. With a new project called Little Dragon about to release what is easily a contender for album of the year, and a heavy touring schedule with Little Dragon and Jose Gonzalez in the coming months, it looks like jazz’s best kept secret is about to be revealed to the world at large and success is a guarantee.

Currently, we’re playing the single for her tune “Recommendations” but to sample a bit more from her palette, here is the video for

and I’ll reprint a great interview for those who want to dig a bit deeper…

Under New MGMT

Been caught in the buzz out of Brooklyn’s MGMT (ie. management) and their excellent new album Oracular Spectacular. For those that don’t know, MGMT is: Andrew Vanwyngarden and Ben Goldwasser, two psychic pilgrims whose paths first intersected in the green pastures of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, circa 2002.

“We weren’t trying to start a band,” Ben remembers. “We were just hanging out, showing each other music that we liked.” Andrew and Ben realized that — despite their opposing views on methodology (one is spontaneously practical, the other is practically spontaneous) — they shared a common love of mystic paganism (ironic indeed on a campus named for the founder of Methodism), psychotropic sounds, and the belief that a joke (or a joke song) could be sad, profound, and funny at the same time. The pair was drawn to the music of other duos and found themselves incorporating the implications of the hallucinatory power-twee of the Incredible String Band, the roaring subway minimalist electronica of Suicide, the silky pop-soul of Hall & Oates, the pulsing narcotic trance of Spacemen 3, the avant-garde industrial romanticism of Royal Trux and much more into the constantly evolving sounds of MGMT.

As on-campus performance art provocateurs, Andrew and Ben began staging a series of “these obnoxious, noisy live electronic shows — we never planned on having it be a recorded project — where we would write these weird techno loops and arrangements that we could play with live. Most of it was running live off the computer and we had a turntable plugged into some guitar pedals, a radio, and a tape player. It was all electronically generated at that point. We would write a new song for each show and our shows would be 15 minutes long.”

The One Song/One Show ethos is manifest in the tracks of Oracular Spectacular, each song on the album shimmers with its own diamond-hard compression of elements interconnecting within MGMT’s “unusual or unconventional pop structures.” Continually inverting expectations, the music of MGMT owes as much to chaos theory as it does to fractal geometry. In contrast to the group’s early live shows, which were mainly electronically generated, Oracular Spectacular is filled with “more traditional rock instruments: electric guitar, bass, drums, keyboards, synthesizers all played live.” Restlessly experimental and consumed with divine discontent, the members of MGMT embarked on a series of temporary guises.

“We went on a tour with a drummer once,” Andrew confesses, “after we’d written these weird California Creedence Clearwater-style songs in two weeks. We went out, played them, and never did the songs again. A lot of people hated it. That used to be the goal of our shows. We were still trying to be obnoxious and somehow people got into it. Some songs we wrote just because we wanted to learn how to be really bad within a certain genre and then people started liking the song because they liked the genre. It was an accident that people started liking us.”

Some of those first fans included a group of NYU students who formed an indie label, Cantora Records, in order to issue the very first MGMT commercial release, Time To Pretend (a 6-song EP, currently available on iTunes). Two of the songs from that EP — “Time To Pretend” (the MGMT “mission statement”) and “Kids” (“filled with all those college feelings: naivety, idealism, nostalgia, happiness, sadness”) — have made it on to Oracular Spectacular. Following the release of the EP and a couple of one-month long tours, MGMT took six months off, with Andrew moving to Brooklyn for a post-college “existential crisis” and Ben hanging out in Connecticut before heading to upstate New York to work woodland construction. Following their hiatus from MGMT, Ben and Andrew reconnoitered in Brooklyn and began recording new songs for the sheer fun of it on an “Mbox computer set-up.”

Those humble home sessions — at once Apollonian and Dionysian — lay the groundwork for what would become Oracular Spectacular. Oracular Spectacular opens with “Time To Pretend” (“fanciful but with an undercurrent of impending doom”) and closes with “Future Reflections” (“premonitions of a post-apocalyptic future where colonies of young people live on the beach and lead savage yet refined primitive lifestyles and go surfing”). In between lie the refractions of the “current chaotic vibrations of the world” on a album which distills the essence of the past, promises and portends the future, and offers an absorbing transformative experience between the molecules in the pulsations of the present. Not to mention an authentic “4th Dimensional Transition.” “Kids are going to be inheriting their parents MP3 collections,” Ben predicts. “And, in that aesthetic, corrupted MP3 files will be like the way people glorify scratched-up records now. In 20 years, people will listen to these 30th generation MP3s and say, ‘I love that sound!’” MGMT invites you to open your mind to the multi-dimensional vibrating Technicolor. -from their web site

Video Wise: Jose James

Time for another video update on the new music we have going on at the station. This time I want to introduce you all to Jose James. An excellent musician, he is as much Jazz as he is hip hop, making his sound sort of on the level with acid jazz and he has been compared to legends from that genre like Leon Thomas or even Roy Ayers. Bottom line for me is that he makes songs that are deep and heady, and wears well over repeat listening. The new album is a bit  buzzworthy, it’s called The Dreamer and features James  running the gamut from jazz classics to re-rubs on some more contemporary (hip hop) sounds. Good stuff, that is the work of a solid year of self promotion in Europe ultimately attracting the attention of radio giant Gilles Peterson of the BBC’s Radio One, who signed him to his excellent label, Brownswood Records. Here is a video featuring James live…feels good this music…enjoy.

Guru Amrit

Video Wise: Vampire Weekend

Here are some videos for the new group now playing at the station, Brooklyn’s Vampire Weekend who have been the buzz of the East coast for a few months for their up-style, hipsturban blend of pop sensibilities that owe much to Africa and the crucible that New York City creates. Ezra Koenig, Chris Baio, Rostam Batmanglij, and Chris Tomson are Vampire Weekend, a a quartet that puts Soukous in their style and England in their pop, polyrhythmic and punky. And the wonder is that NYC didn’t just eat ‘em back up as she does with much of her young talent, instead they’ll soon have to set sights farther afield and I for one would love to hear them in Milwaukee. See for yourself on this video for their latest single “A-Punk”…

And another one for the song “Mansard Roof”

And in their own words, from an article in The Fader:

Where did you guys get your name?
Rostam Batmanglij: We bought it in an auction.

Christopher Tomson: On Ebay.

Ezra Koenig: Vampire Weekend was a movie I started making the summer after my freshman year of college. It was about a guy, that I played, called Walcott whose dad gets killed by vampires because vampires take over his country. His Dad’s dying words were, “you have to go to Cape Cod to tell the mayor that vampires are taking over your country and you have to kill ‘em all.” It was actually about vampires, although fun fact: you can still watch the trailer online. It’s still the second thing that pops up when you google “Vampire Weekend.” The first song I wrote for this band was about Walcott, and it’s vaguely about the movie. We were picking names and I was having cold feet about Vampire Weekend. I thought maybe we should just go by Weekend. But we made the right choice, I can safely say that now.

Did you guys all dig on the same kind of music when you got together?
EK: We all listen to a ton of music, but when we started you could definitely say that we were all on the same page as far as what we wanted it to sound like. We wanted to bring in some Brit-pop, some New-Wave and some African music as well.

Are you all in to African music?
EK: Yeah, but Chris the most.

CT: I just go record shopping all the time and I grab these weird African compilations. You might not necessarily know who all the people are but it’s always really good. It’s almost entirely in major keys and using only three chords, but with the percussion it’s always really really good. I haven’t been disappointed yet.

You can really hear that most in the live percussion, Graceland clearly seeming like the strongest reference point.
EK: It’s true. The music that Paul Simon listened to then is the same we’ve been listening to.

RB: But Paul Simon didn’t just listen to that music, he used it as a structure to work from. We haven’t done anything like that. All our music is pretty original, I think.

CT: That’s not to hate on Graceland, but there is this compilation called The Indestructible Beat of Soweto and there is a song on there with this “Gumboots” sort of beat and there is a song on Graceland with the same band and same tune, but with Paul Simon’s lyrics over it all. There are elements and little bits that we try to work in, but we don’t copy.

EK: He actually had those African session musicians play on the album.

There definitely seems to be a buzz about town.
EK: When we first started playing off campus, we started to get written up. The press sort of compounds itself and more and more people have been coming to shows. Last night was the high point though. The biggest thing we’ve ever done.

Chris Baio: We were all taken aback by the number of people that showed up.

Are you guys shitting yourselves right now?
RB: With excitement or with fear?

Half and half. Choosing a label must be a lot like picking the right college.
RB: Yeah! I guess it is.

CT: It can go so many ways and it’s pretty daunting, but the future looks bright for young Ez’[ra]. (laughs)

Have you been entertaining a lot of offers recently?
CT: We’ve had a lot of meetings.

EK: A lot of people have shown interest. We’ll see exactly where it goes. We’ve had a few good meals.

CT: I think that one sushi restaurant was the best meal we’ve had so far.

Did you guys have any long-term goals when you started?
EK: Yeah, just to be able to do it full-time. We all felt like our dream job would be to play music but obviously you can’t just apply for that.

RB: Musically, we wanted to write songs that were catchy and exciting, but to also bring different worlds together. I think you’ll hear that on the record.

How long have you guys been jamming out together?
EK: We started it our last semester in college, February ‘06. We had been playing elsewhere but Vampire Weekend has been around for a year and four months.

CB: The majority of our shows were on campus at first, playing for campus literary societies (ADD and St. A’s) and at parties.

RB: We were able to get a room because Baio worked at the radio station. That’s where we recorded the drums for “Oxford Comma.”

CT: Eventually, we had to rent out a space in Midtown.

So where did you record?
RB: In a few places. We started in that room at Columbia and then we did some stuff in CT’s family barn. Have you heard of Juan’s Basement? It’s a television program on this network called Plum TV. It wasn’t anything actually when we started; just our friends from Columbia and they live in this house and they have a basement with drums set up and eight mikes and they’re ready to go at all times. It’s awesome. We started there.

CT: It was over the course of a good many months. We weren’t recording it to be our debut album. We just had these songs and we liked to record.

EK: We have twelve or 14 songs with others in the pipeline. Those we don’t play live, but we have ten recorded.

CT: It just ended up becoming this more album-ish group of songs.

So the first pressing was an EP, then?
CT: Well, we just burned them.

EK: Yeah, the first official release will be a three song EP. The album depends on the label stuff, but no matter who we end up putting it out with, I imagine it will be early next year, with singles before that. We are putting out a seven-inch right now.

Are you guys self-releasing everything right now?
EK: Yeah. Well, the seven-inch is a collaboration with these guys that have this pseudo-record label. Their main thing is they run an art gallery in Philadelphia called Space 1016.

You guys start your first tour in July, right? How did you book everything?
RB: Baio took the reigns and started sending out e-mails. We don’t have a manager. We just use our e-mail account to manage ourselves. It’s actually worked out really well so far.

CT: Chris wrote an AWESOME form letter.

CB: It was pretty well-written. Plus, Ezra had a lot of contacts because he toured in Dirty Projectors for a while. We booked the majority of the tour by ourselves, but we just met a great booking agent and he has helped make the tour so much better. It’s going to be a real mixed bag: we’re playing a house party in Roanoke, a show with a bunch of emo bands in Jacksonville, and some really good shows in California as well. There’s been some talk about doing a Depeche Mode dance party in Omaha.

Offshoots: “Skurban” with The Pack

A while back I posted a blog about Dgenerate Nation and noted at the time, that everybody loves a good skateboard jam. There already are many rock songs that immortalize the activity which would make sense as I think that many people would associate skateboarding with grungy white kids in suburban parking lots. In a growing trend however, more hip hop seems to be popping up with a similar appreciation for kickflips and ollies and with it a term to describe MC’s that skate and the music that they make– ‘Skurban.’

As unaware as I was just months ago when I caught the video from a North Carolina crew called Dgenerate Nation, I am on it now as more and more I find music to represent what is no mere phenomenon (or maybe it’s all phenomenal), but what has happened. It’s small stretch from the outskirts of suburbia to the hood and the baggy-assed style and slacker degree are a visible testimony to the fact that things are ofter more similar than they would at first seem.

I digress, but my point is coming; last year, I caught a group called The Pack, with their silly, and infectiously fun single “Vans,” an ode to the old-school skaters’ choicest canvas kicks. Although I liked the song a bunch, it took awhile for me to actually listen to the album, 2007′s Based Boys, and hear what they were coming from. And it’s apparent, their love of good times and skating is enduring. From Berkeley, California, the group consists of Damonte “Uno” Johnson, Brandon “Lil B ” McCartney, Lloyd “Young L” Omadhebo and Keith “Stunnaman ” Jenkins. The Pack was discovered by the veteran rapper Too $hort in 2005. $hort then signed them to his record label, Up All Nite Records. Since then they have released two albums, the most recent the aforementioned Based Boys but they’re first was 2006′s Skateboards 2 Scrapers. If you’ve never heard them, hear you can…enjoy…

Guru Amrit

Wucan Anyone?

In The Future/Jagjaguwar

New band here at the station, Black Mountain, hipped to us by you and already in the hands of a one called me. Charming is coincidence and abso happy to play this cut called “Wucan” (woo-can) from their new album In The Future a double-cd sophomore release that rocks like the 60′s but the view is all new almost jazzy in their experimental psychedelic sound. Although the group is boringly labeled ‘alternative rock,’ justice would be to keep it stocked where all can see because the album is for ‘music’ heads… good stuff… here’s a video for you all…enjoy

thier album is out now…try Atomic Records on the East Side…

Guru Amrit

Music News…

Catching up with Milwaukee’s own Fever Marlene means finding their fresh new album White China. The album follows on the heels of their stunning debut Civil War and sees the guys finding new range to their expression by exploring the creative potential of limitations… like recording the album with a stripped down recording rig and then doing the actual recording at New York’s Chelsea Hotel …like using ordinary objects to fortify their rhythm section… yes, there is glass breaking in that beat. I’ll be playing the RadioMilwaukee premier of the song “Lemon King Mahoney” at about 12:30 today, but if you want to catch the whole album HERE is a link to their site where you can enjoy it in its entirety.

…If you missed the premier of their new album here on the radio, yet don’t(or can’t)  get to their show on Friday at Turner Hall… then try catching them at their listening pary on Wednesday 3/5 at The Yield Bar (1932 E. Kenilworth)…

Also… the dubstep movement that has captured the attention of a number of my recent blogs as well as my dj sets is starting to get major press in the States and several of its major players were featured on this month’s cover of XLR8R Magazine……Benga (who I blogged on last week)& Skream it seems. Here‘s a link to their site…enjoy.

If you are curious about what this dubstep stuff is all about, or are a fan there isan event coming up that’s perfect for you. Friday March 14th is the date, the event is called SUBLOW and is hosted by DJ Screendoor and features some of the best dubstep dj’s in Milwaukee. It’s at the Y-Not III on Kenilworth behind Beans & Barley…see you there.

Guru Amrit

Feelin The Pinch : Underwater Dancehall

Just want to share some music here from an album that has become my favorite release in any genre for the year. Young as that year is, I have found myself playing this awesome (and yet understated) album from an artist named Pinch called Underwater Dancehall(Tectonic). A seamless and sublime mix of music showcasing the growth of dubstep as a genre, as we find Pinch crafting music that find the future within the Now– he has that elusive “It”-ness and all on his first album.

Underwater Dancehall features a number of singers and MC’s from Juakali‘s raw dancehall cries, to the smooth-tempo R&B laced cuts featuring the honey-soul vocals of Yolanda, Pinch has crafted an album that is worth the money. Despite the price, he even cuts a spiritual and otherworldly dub with Sikhi singer Indi Kaur. This album is haunting and yet unpretentious enough for you to find you love it on many levels, almost inspiring poetry or rhyme within your mind, and is an easy repeater. Here is the video for “Brighter Day” featuring Juakali on the mic…enjoy.

Guru Amrit