It is an often repeated truism that Afro-Cuban jazz was born in the early Forties in New York, that it was introduced to the world by Machito and his Afro-Cubans orchestra, and that it was the brainchild of arranger Mario Bauza. Bauza made his great contribution to modern music by…
Arguably no other indie pop release this year is as highly anticipated as the Shins’ sophomore effort, Chutes Too Narrow. In 2001 the quartet seemingly came out of nowhere — well, Albuquerque, New Mexico — with their debut Oh, Inverted World, which was praised and revered by the skinny, geeky,…
“F the Law,” the first song on dead prez’s Get Free or Die Tryin, shocks and prepares you for the group’s oddly charismatic nihilism. “Slap a white boy, snuff your landlord, smash a window, break the camcorder, rob the corner store, bomb the precinct, chase the C.O., stab the D.T.,…
Under his best-known moniker Plastikman, Richie Hawtin produced influential albums like Sheet One, Musik, and Consumed in the Nineties that explored the darker, minimal elements of techno. Thus, it’s no surprise that Closer, his first new Plastikman record since 1998, is an eccentric work overflowing with chilly, sometimes unsettling, extremes…
Does Robert Henke make repetitious machine music? Yes, he deals with electronic sounds, compiling them into cold instrumental landscapes. In some ways his fifth album under the Monolake name, Momentum, sounds like a gazillion other minimal techno records you may have (been unfortunate enough to have) heard: all bleeps and…
Following a series of EPs in the mid-Nineties, British producers Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe tried to insert a spirit of inventiveness into an ailing house music scene with Basement Jaxx’s 1999 debut full-length, Remedy, a refinement of raw materials like soulful New York salsa-house mined from both sides of…
Chicago hard house DJ Bad Boy Bill knows how to keep the party moving. His wildly successful Bangin the Box series draws heavily on his hip-hop background as he cuts up raucous party tracks. “My DJ style originated with the idea to remix a song live with two copies of…
I know, I know, I’ve been a South Bitch. Lately it’s been nothing but apple martinis, kisses on both cheeks, and rum and Coke in the VIP room. So last week I dusted off my white K-Swiss kicks and my favorite pair of Silvertabs, which are literally baggy enough to…
When Space 34 announced on October 2 that it was shutting its doors with an October 11 “closing party,” two months after a highly publicized drug raid by the Drug Enforcement Administration that netted eleven arrests, all you could hear for days was the churning of the rumor mill. Some…
It’s not even 1:00 p.m., but things are already totally disorganized and way behind schedule on the set for “Get Low Remix,” the new video starring Atlanta’s most charismatic and aggressive rapper/screamer, Lil’ Jon. The king of crunk and his Eastside Boys are filming the clip’s “club scene” at Miami…
If you’re a member of a not-too-ambitious weekend rock band in a Great Lakes city like Milwaukee, Chicago, Toledo, or Detroit, the handwriting is probably on the banquet hall wall. There are only so many bars, coffeehouses, and clubs that book live music. Playing for an audience, any audience, and…
It’s yet another sweltering fall day on Lincoln Road in Miami Beach, yet Billy Paul Williams stays cool as a cucumber, seemingly unfazed by the constant, sticky heat. The 37-year-old musician is dressed in typical SoBe gear — shorts, a T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, and a Champion Athletic…
The story goes that Page McConnell, keyboardist for Phish and leader of Vida Blue, was on vacation in Miami Beach when he caught a gig by the Spam Allstars, eventually sitting in with the band for a night. He was so taken with their sound that he proposed a collaboration…
The Rapture has been floating atop a steamship of media hype; its debut album, Echoes, could sweep this young New York-based band over the top and into an ultra-mainstream echelon (instead of just recognition from pop stars gagging to work with them and their British-born producers, DFA). Though sounding derivative…
Every year a ragtag caravan of musicians speeds through the California wasteland, kicking up a cloud of sand as it heads toward its remote, mystical destination. Burning Man? Nah. They’re going to Rancho de la Luna in Joshua Tree, where Queens of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme has presided…
Beth Gibbons’s first album since her last Portishead project is both agonizingly beautiful and uncomfortably intense, a pairing with Paul “Rustin Man” Webb (formerly of Talk Talk) that dives headfirst into her vocal eccentricities. At various times she coos soft, comforting lullabies (“Sand River”); strains her voice into a thin…
Jaylib promises to be a dream collaboration between two of the hottest producers in hip-hop, Jay Dee (formerly of Slum Village) and Madlib (Lootpack, Quasimoto). But the resulting Champion Sound is slightly more earthbound, as each tries to outdo the other with numbskull raps about players and hoes. It gets…
During the Nineties, British DJ/producer LTJ Bukem seemed to take the more famous Goldie and Roni Size’s penchant for watery, atmospheric drum and bass to the extreme; on the Logical Progression compilation his music was seemingly defined by organic, jazz-fusion escapades, not the lightly syncopated drums that made it so…
There was a familiar sight on Collins Avenue last Thursday night — a horde of chic and beautiful people wishing, hoping, and praying to be anointed worthy of entry to the most exclusive VIP joint this side of the Hamptons, Mynt Ultra Lounge. Ah Mynt, the club so many love…
There must be something in the British psyche that compels them, as soon as they’re of age, to trundle off to exotic locales across the globe. Wherever you go in the world, it seems, you always manage to run into a traveler from the U.K. So when a young graduate…
In September, NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory announced that a supermassive black hole in the Perseus galaxy emits B-flat sound waves. That was almost a year after Sune Rose Wagner and Sharin Foo — a.k.a. Denmark’s the Raveonettes — released their first album, Whip It On, composed entirely in the key…
It was a Friday afternoon on August 7, the second to last day of the Billboard R&B and Hip-Hop Conference Awards, and Little Brother — Phonte, Big Pooh, and producer Ninth Wonder — had already grown tired of the networking and the schmoozing that characterized the week-long event. They had…
