It’s hard to believe it’s been a half-decade since the summer and fall of 2009, when Mono/Poly’s “Beatles Bitch” and “MS-14” acted as nitroglycerin inside Low End Theory. Dubstep had yet to defeat itself and the suplexing wobble and bass of his tracks was so heavy you didn’t even know to respond. They felt like […]

I had a conversation yesterday about who could remotely considered to be called the next Outkast. As you’d expect, there were no answers. One of the explanations is that Outkast were a group, closer to a rock band than a solo artist. You don’t need me to recite all the rap platitudes about rap groups […]

Eric Thurm doesn’t know where the bathroom is. It’s taken Thundercat a while to release a video off Apocalypse. Fun and funky dance floor burner “Oh Sheit It’s X” seems like the obvious choice. But the man responsible for bringing back the space bass doesn’t roll like that. Instead, the first visual offering from Apocalypse […]

Album artwork is usually incidental detail, not so for Brainfeeder’s Teebs whose painting career preceded his sonic one. So when you see one of his canvasses, it’s intrinsically tied to his sound design and vice versa. So when I hear “View Point,” my impressions are already stained by the colors above. The first impression that […]

Evan Nabavian is the lizard king. Hiroshi Yamauchi stories are the best. When the late Nintendo boss couldn’t find his driver, he had one of the company’s engineers drive him to a meeting. On the way, the engineer spoke to fill the silence – the boss didn’t talk much. The engineer recalled seeing a man […]

Evan Nabavian’s favorite Ghost is Dennis Coles. Rap fans’ years of bellyaching about radio pandering left them bereft of rappers who can rap well and make songs with real musicality. The infighting created an ideological divide between rappers with skill and rappers with style (oversimplifying, of course) where hooks and catchiness fell in the latter […]

Teebs continues to make music that makes you want to build a condo in the clouds to hang up abstract psychedelic canvasses, spin esoteric library records, and sip on sangria. The drums on this are the stars, echoing and tribal and hazy. Tuesdaze exist too.

As an Australian-based journalist, it’s a little rare to interview an American artist on the verge of an album release. But not as rare as it used to be: independent musicians now make the majority of their money touring, and that includes touring internationally. Sometimes the timing gets a little awkward. I caught up with […]

Max Bell is headed overseas.  Germany, Thailand, Singapore, Maryland, Los Angeles—Azizi Gibson has never not been on the move. Raised as perpetually mobile military brat, he has no real hometown. As a result, it seems he’s not bound by any particular regional sound or set of aesthetic criteria. There’s no scholarly (read: sometimes cringingly derivative) adherence […]

Will Hagle. Real Name. No gimmicks. By namesake alone, The Underachievers haven’t quite poised themselves for greatness. I will refrain from stating the obvious, but Indigoism is proof of the paradoxical nature of their name. A spot on the Brainfeeder roster is further evidence. “May’s Patience” is the latest track to be released by Issa […]