Who do that voodoo? Kudu so well. Founded in the Drrrty Drrrty (Atlanta, a.k.a. the A Game) but refined in the Borough of Kings (Brooklyn), Kudu shed all baby fat and jazz-fusion while producing the sinewy full-length, Death of the Party. Kudu — the collaboration of Deantoni Parks and Sylvia…
If you like your downtempo with hand drums, maracas, kalimbas, clanging cowbells, and vocalese, classic soul DJ Tommy Bones’s African, East Indian, and Brazilian-flavor mixes will have you dancing like the possessed. This Connecticut Yankee gone global with releases on King Street, Wave, and most recently Defected cut his teeth…
Miguel Migs’s music is not easy to classify. He hails from Northern California, and hints of the Golden State can be found shining through his productions with chill, soulful beats infused with jazzy horns and an assortment of other influences. Classy deep house tracks have made dance music’s pretty boy…
Following in the almost absurd tradition of Teflon-coated, press-shy android-funk duo Daft Punk, Frenchman Pascal Arbez-Nicolas has maintained an ambiguity in the press as he produces under the name Vitalic. Lurking in the shadows, however, has not diminished the profile of Vitalic’s unrelenting electro-house singles (releases dating from 2001 to…
I knew it was the beginning of a great night when a dopey-eyed, thuggish teenager grabbed my distressed denim skirt-clad ass on the sidewalk about a block from my destination. After threatening his life, I had finally achieved the adrenaline rush I’d been seeking all evening and was ready to…
Dan Martin wears many hats: beach bum, topless gazer, gabber, musician, performance artist, provocateur, et cetera, but since relocating to our sunny shores from Milwaukee in 2002, he certainly hasn’t dilly-dallied in pushing the boundaries of his Doormouse persona. Not to be confused with his more serene cousin, the church…
Horror music buffs know their Cramps, their Misfits, their eerie Jack Starr homemade tapes of the early Sixties, and basically every twang set to B-grade celluloid. But one of the truest horrors beset upon mankind was the recharged wave of ska-related bands of the early Nineties. Either on purpose or…
“Iko-Iko” is the name of a Fifties pop song written by James Crawford in New Orleans that quickly became a folk/blues standard and has been covered by countless legends. It is also the fitting name of the renowned Miami-based blues quartet founded by the mythical Graham Wood Drout, a vocalist/guitarist/percussionist…
Sweet New Jersey has had a bad rap for so long now it’s beginning to tarnish great summertime vacation memories of visiting my relatives in Newark. Quick facts about the Garden State: Pre-psychic friends Dionne Warwick, Frank Sinatra, and Connie Francis hail from there; the first solid-body guitar (Les Paul,…
In the aftermath of the devastation wreaked by Hurricane Katrina on their hometown of New Orleans, Cowboy Mouth’s new album finds the bandmates bloodied but unbowed. Voodoo Shoppe is the boldest, brashest album of their collective career. A set of songs that pays tribute to both their influences and environs,…
The type of woozy, warbled guitar sounds that pervade some of Boards of Canada’s Campfire Headphase are the same brand that induced Boards member Marcus Eoin to help Bibio secure a record deal. Stephen Wilkinson, operating here as experimentalist Bibio, twists the classically arranged guitar-based songwriting on Hand Cranked into…
As Sergio Mendes’s Timeless demonstrates, the songwriting of Brazilian masters like Antonio Carlos Jobim, Baden Powell, and Jorge Ben is like architecture that retains its beauty under the weight of any addition. So while Black Eyed Peas producer will.i.am might not add any real elegance to compositions like “Surfboard” and…
Part of the appeal of producing music with machines and expensive toys is that instruments and complex beats can be synthesized with the turn of a knob. Yet when a DJ’s live set is more akin to checking e-mail than performing, technology can be a drawback. D:Fuse is bringing the…
House music veteran Frankie Knuckles and rising stars Simon Marlin and Max Reich, a.k.a. the Shapeshifters or Shape UK, are joining forces during WMC to promote their respective new albums. If Knuckles’s 2004 A New Reality is any indicator of what to expect for his new release, fans of house…
Actor Jared Leto (Requiem for a Dream, Fight Club) has been fasting for four days. Except for water, fresh lemon, and cayenne pepper, he plans to consume little else for a few more days. Leto is burning off the staggering 62 pounds he packed on to play John Lennon’s assassin,…
Jack DeJohnette, from his frenzied funk-brilliance electric period, to his masterful work driving Keith Jarrett’s Standards Trio and performances such as his recent exploratory show with Chick Corea and Eddie Gomez at the IAJE (International Association for Jazz Education) conference in New York, has never shied away from an almost…
Big Shiny Cars is an intelligent, glossy update of classic country-rock. As on the 2002 major-label debut, Pinmonkey, the band splits the difference between country and something a bit more akin to the Americana of Los Lobos. Michael Reynolds’s tenor vocals glide over songs like Dolly Parton’s “Down,” which sounds…
Prior to Stereolab taking off, hipster siren/chanteuse Laetitia Sadier made her living as an au pair. With its advancing and receding brass sweeps, rose-color kaleidoscopic organ carousels, burrowing keyboard weevils, and Sadier’s own twisting vocal glide, “Plastic Mile” evokes a slow, sweet cable-car ride across a theme park of unspeakably…
It feels like any other morning at Calle Ocho’s world-famous Domino Park. Groups of elderly guayabera-clad Cuban men play dominoes amid the usual exile chatter and cigar smoke. But only a few feet away, a small crowd of city officials and camera crews breaks the monotony as the men witness…
Studio A’s creators see Miami as an important, untapped entertainment resource. “Miami has had a big void in live music for years. When I was growing up here, the tours would all stop in Atlanta … but there’s such a young, energetic, creative art scene breaking out of Miami, and…
For Copperopolis, Charlie Hunter, accustomed to switching personnel from album to album, sticks with the same jam-oriented jazz trio heard on 2004’s Friends Seen and Unseen, a subsidiary of the quintet from the previous year’s Right Now Move, his last of six discs for Blue Note. Hunter plays guitar and…
The ten-year anniversary of the DJ-Kicks series is celebrated in DJ-Kicks: The Exclusives, a scouring of Berlin’s !K7 respectable back catalogue. The results deal in a getting-the-guests-in-the-living-room-stoned type of downbeat as well as in coke-fueled club-floor dry-humpers. Standouts hold down The Exclusives in the first few cuts — in the…
