Stones Throw Podcast #66: Flying Lotus

Fresh as of today out of the oven, Flying Lotus podcast brought to you by the fine folks at Stones Throw.

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STONES THROW PODCAST 66: LOVERS MELT MIXED BY FLYING LOTUS

Roc C Discusses Upcoming Projects, His Work With J Dilla And More

Stones Throw artist Roc C just wrapped up the Value Menu Tour here on the West Coast with Tanya Morgan, Hall of Justus artist Chaundon and debuting Rapper Big Pooh of Little Brother and Roc C new joint project - Young Americans. I caught up with Roc C for a post performance interview.

Beside discussing Roc C's many upcoming projects in 2011, we also had a pretty lengthy discussion about his last days working with the late J Dilla.

SXSW 2010 Stones Throw Showcase Austin, TX

via Stones Throw

On Mar. 17, 8PM-1AM, Converse is presenting our event 45 Live, with Madlib, Wolf, J.Rocc, Dam-Funk, 14KT and Amir playing all 45s. We've teamed up with Wax Poetics for this one. We'll be giving away limited edition copies of the Mayer Hawthorne/James Pants split-45 where they are covering each other's tracks “Thin Moon” and “Green Eyed Love”.

Madlib Profiled In The Guardian UK Newspaper

Here's something you might want to type into Google to help you make your own personal radio show: the Last Electro-Acoustic Space Jazz & Percussion Ensemble. You might just want to type it into Google because it's a very lovely thing to type. And then, as a reward, it will take you somewhere. You'll come across a new album by them called Miles Away (Stones Throw), which isn't totally what you think it is because of that title, and yet is – it's not directly a Miles thing but an electronically moderated tribute to a kind of hard, ethereal post-bop jazz that mixes the free and the arranged, the drum and the horn. Put it this way: it'll take you nicely on your radio show from Ascenseur pour l'échafaud Miles to this minute's Gorillaz. Then you can play Floating Points, Flying Lotus and Flying Lizards, and take it from there.

Actually, Miles Away sounds like music you could hear on Radios 2, 3 and, to some extent, 4, but it's not likely to appear on many commercial playlists. As smart, accessible, gorgeous and right on the dissolving, accelerating now as it is, as elegantly conceived to look and sound great as a prized vinyl object, summoning all sorts of longing and learning, it doesn't fit into known grooves, or safely known avant-genres, even though ultimately it's jazz-related and rooted in hip-hop adventure. It's jazz for those who like their jazz deeply cosmic, to suggest where the great Blue Note acts might be in a post-sampling, post-rock, post-web, post-computer game world, jazz for those who like their jazz to have a relationship with tradition that is both respectful and mischievous.

The Last Electro-Acoustic Space Jazz & Percussion Ensemble is yet another alias of the sound-spinning, time-jumping, music-mapping many voiced multi-instrumentalist Madlib, who never stops, who cannot keep still and is hard to keep up with, as he sorts out his agile, vigilant mind by jumping from character to character, project to project, scene to scene, decade to decade, punch line to punch line. He's Prince as hallucinated by Philip K Dick, Coltrane running through the veins of Burroughs, himself more or less aka someone else altogether. He's spent a lot of the past few years fixing into place, and then moving away from that place, eloquent fusions of hip-hop and jazz, inventing groups, and then playing all the roles and instruments in these imaginary groups, so that he's Kamala Walker of the Soul Tribe, Monk Hughes of the Outer Realm, Eddie Prince with the Fusion Band, Ahmad Miller of the Suntouch; he's everyone in Yesterdays New Quintet, jamming among his many competing, combining selves. I think. Don't hold me to any of this.

As soon as you think you might have caught up with his new name(s), latest release, current sound, freshest calculation, he's somewhere else, following a new lead, reworking an old gag, digging up more buried treasure, on the run to the inside and outside of everything.

He moves so fast and fluidly through ideas and possibilities, creating a personal, brilliant history of music as he mixes himself and his other personalities with possibly real collaborators and ways of paying tribute to, say, Stevie Wonder, the Trojan label, the Blue Note label, movie soundtracks, jazz hybrids known only to the most fervent connoisseur, that he almost becomes invisible. Perhaps if he stayed in one place one time, instead of tripping behind blurring names, masks, identities, passions, visions, revisions, disclosures, his latest album, his latest blast from a past he makes seem like the future, he might get more of the fashionable attention. But fame to him is just another illusion he's messing around with. He's taking the chasing of freedom to sensational extremes.

Another way of looking at it is that Madlib, this master manipulator of history, ego, sound, electronics and image, this boastful anti-publicist, is the ultimate superstar of a new ghostly, free-forming alternative universe, a dark, crazed underground you can reach into through that tempting Google door, another shape-shifting reality made up of found and remade realities, a hyper-electric zone where you can organise endless presences, and presents, for yourself.

Yes, there are numerous attractive pop stars out and about at the moment, all piling on top of each other, all building on the shapes, poses, publicity stunts and role-playing antics of various antecedents, sounding wonderful if a little shallow, all being showered with awards, places in pop charts and playlists, stars on Amazon, all relishing their ability to exploit and dominate the far-fetched internet era to ensure the success of their ever-present glamour and state-of-the-art fuss – but this far into the 21st century, to be as fixed, as regular, as just another update, a latest minor correction, to Prince or Bowie or Madonna or (T. Rex) Bolan or Grace (Jones?) seems a little old-fashioned, a tame, actually conservative way of reacting to and reflecting all the technological and environmental changes happening everywhere at each given moment.

Hidden deep in the turbulent centreless centre of all this diverting possibility, cut off from the lively but mundane pop civilisation as represented by the award shows, the famous faces and the mainstream indie websites, fragmenting his personality, his relative fame, his musical enthusiasms into more and more randomly interrelated bits, exists Madlib. The racy, shady, mad king of this other, oddly realer, world. The invisible, improvising, abstract superstar, experimenting with time, scattering clues all over the less than secure place, checking out the limits of the imagination, hinting how we might operate in the future, where we will be able to freely select, compile and adjust our multiple identities and the numerous dimensions we inhabit. Now that's what you want a musician to do: see into the future by listening to the past to remake the present. Even if very few notice at the time. (source)

Madlib Goes Pseudo Psychedelic With 'Kill 'Em' (O.J. Simpson Remix) Ft. Guilty Simpson

Off of Madlib's 'Madlib Medicine Show #1: Before the Verdict' available on Stones Throw's website, Malib ft. Guilty Simpson 'Kill' Em' (O.J. Simpson remix) is the track.

Madlib plans to release a album each month in 2010, Madlib Medicine Show #1 being the first in the series. (source)

Hear Madlib's 'Kill 'Em' (O.J. Simpson Remix) ft. Guilty Simpson HERE

Mayer Hawthorne: London's Independent Newspaper Highlights Stones Throw Artist

If you haven't yet heard of (Mayer) Hawthorne, chances are you'll be instantly hooked. He's a dreamily original artist, who draws on the noblest traditions of Motown and soul, with an alluring modern quirkiness – a trick last pulled by Amy Winehouse.

Hawthorne's unique "sound" and manner combines the timeless elegance of Barry White or Marvin Gaye with the raised eyebrow of, say, the Divine Comedy. You don't have to take my word for it, either. Ask, oh, Ashton Kutcher and Perez Hilton, or Mark Ronson and Snoop Dogg. They have all recently pegged A Strange Arrangement among the best new records of 2009.

"Soul music isn't the only place my sound comes from," he says. "When I mix drums, for example, I'm not trying to mix them like Smokey Robinson. I want them to sound more modern. I also listen to heavy metal, like Tool and Helmet and Iron Maiden. And some of that comes out in the album, too. You've also got a wailing guitar solo on a track called "Green Eyed Love" that you'd never hear on, say, a Motown record."

He recorded the first Mayer Hawthorne track in his bedroom, playing all the instrumental parts, singing all the vocals, and mixing them on basic equipment ("Mayer" is Cohen's middle name, "Hawthorne" is the street he grew up on). A handful of two-track demo CDs were made, passed to friends "for a sort of joke," and forgotten about. In 2006, Cohen moved to Los Angeles in an effort to make a living out of hip-hop, with a group called Now On. One night last year, he was introduced to music mogul Chris Manak (aka "Peanut Butter Wolf") who owns the influential LA label Stone's Throw Records. Mayer Hawthorne came up in conversation.

"My friend, who introduced us, mentioned it," recalls Cohen. "I was a bit pissed-off, because I was trying to pump my hip-hop career, but I sent the songs to Peanut Butter Wolf anyway. About a month later, he emailed saying, 'I just listened to the tracks. This is awesome... who wrote them?' He couldn't believe they were my tracks. He thought they were old songs I'd got the rights to." Soon afterwards, Hawthorne was signed-up by Stones Throw.

Read the full article here:
London's Independent - Mayer Hawthorne - Haircut's worked it all out

Dam-Funk LA Times Upcoming Feature

As reported by Eric Ducker at the Los Angeles Times

Dam is one of those rare artists who looks the way his music sounds. With his pressed shoulder-length hair and taste for retro future sunglasses he could be confused for some kid's mentor in a coming-of-age film, someone who works in a community center or a roller rink where he spins records and drops sage advice about the opposite sex.

His songs share that same nostalgic cool. Titles like "Burn Straight Thru U" and "Candy Dancin' " come beamed from an entirely less self-conscious era. The idea of escape -- mentally, on the freeway or into your own dimension -- is one of his recurring lyrical themes. On "The Sky Is Ours" he croons, "Look in the mirror and realize who you are / You hold the flame of the funk and that's real / You know who you are / Live your dreams, don't let no one take them from you."

Stones Throw Records last week released all 139 minutes of Dam-Funk's full-length debut, "Toeachizown," as a double-CD collection, but the music has been available online since August on the label's website, which offered "Toeachizown" incrementally as five digital mini-albums. Later this year, Stones Throw will package "Toeachizown" on vinyl as a five-record set.

Read the whole article here:
LA Times - Dam-Funk: In with the new, out with the old

During Dam's recent trip to Japan:


Learn more about Dam-Funk here:
Stones Throw
MySpace

Interview With Artist & Producer Oh No

via Hip Hop DX interviewed by William E. Ketchum III

HipHopDX: On your first album, The Disrupt, you both rapped and produced. As of late, I’ve seen you focus on producing. Why the switch-up?

Oh No: I actually still do both really heavy. I just prefer to do beats, because it helps you branch out with other musicians. When I’m rapping, it’s moreso therapy for myself. When I’m doing beats, I’m linking up with everybody. I’m just making different vibes. When it’s Oh No rapping, you’re getting mad, pure raw shit. I’m normally an angry person, so I usually don’t even like that shit to come out. I want to give the good vibes and give some good motion with the beats. But I do both. As I’m doing these beats, I’m doing an album with Alchemist, and I’m rapping a lot on that. I’ve got an album with Chino XL and Roc 'C'.

DX: Like you said, a Stones Throw template was the Champion Sound idea. What do you take from that? Did you look at that as an influence while working with Alchemist?

Oh No: I think the J Dilla/Madlib project made people want to collaborate more. Before, it used to be, “I’m working with my crew, and this is my crew only. If we do a song, it’s only going to be one song with someone who’s just as big as me.” That’s how people worked. But nowadays, it’s all about collaborations and making moves together. That’s what it’s all about. When the Jaylib album came out, they were basically just rapping over each others’ beats. Madlib had already made an album over those beats, and Dilla was working on his stuff. As soon as he got the Madlib [beats], he started knocking that stuff out. Whereas me and Alchemist [worked differently]…it was just a chemistry, like, “Let’s do some joints together.” As opposed to just rapping over each others’ beats. Jaylib, that shit was just raw. They weren’t worried about no sales, or no marketing. It was just, “This is the music that we made. Support that shit.” That’s it; that’s our whole feel. We aren’t worried about nothing. This is us, 100% raw uncut. Oh No and Alchemist. Everybody knows he has sick beats, and if they don’t know, they will know that he has the illest rhymes too. He’s O.G., he’s back in the day. He’s coming back right.

Read the rest of the interview here:
Hip Hop DX - Producer's Corner: Oh No