What I’m Into This Week (8/21 – 8/27)

frank ocean helmet

This week brought some genuine surprise to the music world. Frank Ocean finally crashed the hype train into public view, dropping his long-awaited sophomore album on a weekend night. After four years, nobody expected it to appear so randomly, but here we are.

This is the state of music in 2016. The pendulum of control is truly swinging back in favor of the artists. Everything else I discovered this week was courtesy of the artists themselves, broadcasting personally on Twitter, Bandcamp, and other open platforms.

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DJ Shadow + Run The Jewels – Nobody Speak

Nobody Speak video

Did you know DJ Shadow released a new album this year, and that it’s pretty good?

Nobody Speak is of the unquestionable highlights,  a team-up with hip-hop superheroes Run The Jewels. Now there’s a hilarious, action packed video to go along with it.

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Frank Ocean – Nikes

frank-ocean-nikes

So this just happened on a Saturday night because Frank Ocean wanted to surprise us all. It worked.

It’s new Frank Ocean music. It’s fantastic.

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What I’m Into This Week (7/3 – 7/9)

Days of Heaven fire

It’s been a violent week in America. Violence by police. Violence against police. The country’s long gone mad. All I can offer is a quote from one of my favorite films, Days of Heaven:

The whole earth is goin’ up in flames. Flames’ll come out of here and there and they’ll just rise up. The mountains are gonna go up in big flames, the water’s gonna rise in flames. There’s gonna be creatures running every which way, some of them burnt, half their wings burning. People are gonna be screaming and hollerin’ for help. See, the people that have been good, they’re gonna go to heaven and escape all that fire.  But if you’ve been bad God don’t even hear you. He don’t even hear you talking.

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What I’m Into This Week (6/12 – 6/25)

Aphex Twin laying in grass

The past two weeks rolled with dark gravity, anchored by the massacre in Orlando that saw 49 people killed in an LGBT dance club. It may be only the latest in a nearly constant string of mass shootings in the US, but it’s the most devastating in my lifetime. I’ll never forget the gut punch of hearing the news.

It’s important to seize on the image of us at our worst, not just to examine how and why, but so we can truly appreciate us at our best. Still, it’s just as important to grasp the good news when we have it. With that in mind, I want to share the great musical discoveries I made in the past couple weeks.

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Boards of Canada – Dayvan Cowboy

Boards of Canada

I’ve been a fan of Boards of Canada for almost 20 years now. Ever since being introduced to much of the Warp catalogue by coworkers at Circuit City in high school, I’ve considered this mysterious duo to be one of those bedrock favorites, the kind of group that I’m always happy to hear.

While I consider 2002’s Geogaddi to be their true masterpiece, beating out landmark debut Music Has The Right To Children by an avant-garde hair, it wasn’t until much later that they had any sort of official visual accompaniment to their music. When they dropped The Campfire Headphase in 2005, Boards of Canada finally released their first music video.

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Clams Casino and Lil B – Witness

Clams Casino Lil B

I haven’t talked about Lil B on this blog in years. But here he is, back with a new Clams Casino joint and sounding better than he has in a while. The production, also featuring Keyboard Kid, is beyond superb.

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