Bullion has long since been cherished for his mash up album Pet Sounds: In The Key Of Dee and bassy floorfiller Get Familiar. His most recent release, You Drive Me To Plastic, released by Young Turks Records, is abeautifully sewn together 21 minute piece of music consisting of nine tracks drawing from leftfield disco, krautrock, exotica and afro inspired 70’s electronics that he preferred to call a ‘non-LP’. …Read More.
We don’t do end of year lists at Bonafide but if we did Dimlite’s Grimm Reality would we be well up there alongside Shabazz Palaces’ Black Up, Thundercat’s The Golden Age of Apocalypse and Stepkids self-titled debut as some of the strongest releases of 2011.
Andy Spragg described Grimm Realityas “Ducking the cliché of ‘being taken on a musical journey’, Grimm Reality is more akin to going from ‘in here’ to ‘out there’, a sudden collapse of constraint into dazzling inventiveness.” …Read More.
To mark the release of their latest vinyl on limited 10” through RAMP Recordings, Stay+ (Christopher Poole + Matt Farthing) have made a video for ‘Dandelion’, a track featuring vocals from Moshi Moshi’s Psychologist. In keeping with their bewitching aesthetic last seen on their Bonafide Beats #23 mix, the video depicts a debauched and haunting flat party complete with baked beans on toast.
‘Dandelion’ will also feature on an upcoming EP due in Spring 2012 also on RAMP.
All City Records, the Dublin based independent label specialising in electronic leaning hip-hop, continues to defy the odds in a David v Goliath type fashion with the type of releases that make other labels (with far bigger budgets, dare i speculate) green with envy. …Read More.
Dimlite
Grimm Reality
Now Again
One of the most praiseworthy things that can be said about record label Now-Again (and its parent label Stones Throw) is that they take a wonderfully eclectic approach to the music they decide to release. Concepts such as ‘brand identity’ seem gleefully alien when you place the cumulative roster alongside one another, and it is with this in mind that one comes to Grimm Reality. In actual fact, ‘gleefully alien’ is perhaps better put use to describe the deranged, jarring but ultimately brilliant third album of Swiss producer and musician Dimlite.
Bonafide set out with the aim to celebrate hip-hop. Our aim was to explore ‘old-school, mid-school and new-school creativity’, five issues on we’re proud to present the old school x new school issue. In hip-hop chronological order we speak to the Godfather of it all, Grandmaster Flash, profile EPMD, the funky Long Island duo from the golden age of rap and get crazy with ‘the lazy hustler’ and fourth Beastie Boy, Ricky Powell. …Read More.
In 2006 Spank Rock’s channelling of Miami Bass hedonism and dayglo hipsterism made his debut album Yoyoyoyoyo a refreshingly dangerous – even unhinged – break from rap’s standard macho scowl. It was filthy, bass-heavy, and fairly unrepentant about its fixation with drugs and x-rated dancing. Cycling forward to 2011 and it is probably safe to say that not a great deal has changed for Spank Rock, at least in terms of lyrical content. …Read More.
PUTTING IN ‘WERK
When hip-hop’s beats became untethered from the vocals in 1996, few could have predicted the implications. It levelled the playing field for producers from all over the world to concentrate on sonic rather than geographical landscapes. Beats became dislocated from the semantics of words and formed a new language as producers from Tokyo to Leeds set about crafting beats on MPCs and SPs or using their parents’ computers. Nowadays, a neck-snapper is as likely to come from Singapore or Melbourne as it is from one of the five boroughs. Freeing the producer from beats that work for MCs has also let it incorporate more disparate influences and evolve more quickly. …Read More.
Stay+ are something of an enigma, and by all accounts they’re very keen to keep it that way, adopting a meme like course of action to do so…
Here’s what little we do know about the collective; this summer they were forced to change their name from the ludicrously funny Christian AIDS after the charity name-sake issued them with a rather uncharitable ‘trademark infringement notice’, they come from Manchester and released only their second physical release this week, the bewitching Fever, via a 12″ on Ramp. …Read More.
London based promoters Sound Crash have been pulling out all the stops with recent sell out shows including Flying Lotus, DOOM X Ghostface at the Roundhouse and next week’s screening of Beats Rhymes and Life, Michael Rapaport’s candid documentary on the legendary A Tribe Called Quest, followed by a performance from Phife Dawg (there are still a few tickets for the show at Cargo on Tuesday).
This Saturday night features a cast closer to home with a label takeover by our friends from the south, Tru Thoughts, pitching up at Koko. …Read More.
