Max Bell is just chillin eating lamb brain I gave up on my unspoken dream of becoming a rapper a long time ago. There are enough decent white rappers and Aesop Rock is already Aesop Rock. But there was a time when I wrote rhymes in the margins of college ruled notebooks, more focused on […]

Aaron Frank woke up early on his bornday This month’s mix is mostly instrumental, but it’s difficult to ignore the vast crop of talented producers coming out of the UK at the moment. In waiting a couple extra days to put this mix together, I was able to score new tracks from two of my […]

Chris Daly is naughty. By nature. The “problem” with spring is that it never lasts long enough for anyone’s liking. Whether I’ve been living in Chicago, with its seemingly endless winters, or Washington, D.C., with its too humid summers, there’s never enough upper 60s/lower 70s, first buds popping on the trees, leave the coat at […]

Peter Holslin ate nachos for breakfast Lately I’ve been spending lots of time staying up late, watching television, playing online chess, and planning out my future. I’ll be lying there on the couch, iPhone in hand, typing little messages into my yellowed digital notebook—things to do, daily goals, weekly goals, hard deadlines, soft deadlines, reminders […]

Harold Stallworth has a thing for Joan Pringle. Have you ever noticed that the golden eras for black movie soundtracks coincide with the surge and resurgence of the American durag? Perhaps if we all wore our stocking caps to work next week, The Alchemist would score the next Steve McQueen film. In the meantime, dig […]

Fall in L.A. isn’t markedly different than any other season of the year. There are fewer seventy-five and sunny let’s-go-to-the-beach days. And there are people (read: mental defectives) who wear heavy winter coats when the temp drops below sixty-five. Still, fall in L.A. isn’t really fall, just like the woman serving your latte isn’t really […]

Spinning 45s at 33 RPM induces a disorienting effect. It’s not the slowness of the chop and screw, but a still-woozy crawl that seems to bring out the funk and soul of the right songs. It’s the sort of thing you rarely hear in 2013, because rare is the DJ that brings vinyl to a […]

If you’re at all familiar with his work, it’s fitting that Ted Feighan moved from Ohio to Los Angeles. Over the past handful of years, Feighan’s sublime solo project Monster Rally has evolved from the Seasonal Affective Disorder escapism of exotic loop-based psychedelia/tropicalia to the twinkly-eyed glamor of Old Hollywood. With each successive release, he’s […]

Harold Stallworth refuses to be a bounce apprentice. Doo Wop will always be my personal favorite mixtape curator. He’s the missing link between DJ Clue and Kid Capri, priding himself on exclusives but never at the expense of a flawless mix. In his heyday, he would impose his will using well-timed, echoey voice-overs that always […]

Everyone’s going to be at Fabric and Son Raw is just sitting here in Canada. Parris is a name I’d seen thrown around with Wen, Moleskin, Rabit, Beneath and other up and coming DJs at the periphery of Grime/UK music’s new wave, but without a release or even much completed work on his Soundcloud page, […]