The Audiozine

Jay Stay Paid -- new album of unreleased J Dilla jams, mixed by Pete Rock, w/vox from Black Thought and MF Doom.

Chinatown Wars -- new jam from the upcoming Ghostface/MF Doom collab.

For starters, an apology: in 2007 there were no new posts to the Audiozine Listening Series. Two reasons: A) I was super busy with school and B) I am a huge procrastinator and it made more sense to procrastinate on this blog than on my schoolwork.

That said, here's a short and sweet set of posts to music I meant to post throughout 2007. May they make yr summer 2008 merry:

1) Spoon -- The Underdog (Demo)
Spoon's Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga came out in summer '07 and became my number one jam of the sunny season. Ga... is their most accomplished album, managing to sound terse and tense, but replacing the minimalism of earlier LP's with a new lushness. This demo version of lead single "The Underdog" comes from a limited 7" that came with the album if you bought it at an independent record store. Which I did.

2) Spoon -- It Took A Rumor To Make Me Wonder, Now I'm Convinced I'm Going Under
The B-side to aforementioned 7". This is a quirky little electro-disco-dub workout.

3) Radiohead -- The Gloaming (DJ Shadow Remix)
Remember the Bush era? When nobody could so much as question anything without being labeled Al-Q-whatever? Well, back then Radiohead set the standard for political rock -- namely, they (and TV On The Radio, who had some politically charged moments on "Return to Cookie Mountain") expressed our sense of frustration and powerlessness. Too bad they couldn't transcend it with their music and offer reasons to take action, get informed, or at least stay hopeful. Well, whatever, here's a track from Hail to the Thief, remixed by DJ Shadow and released as a limited vinyl single. Couldn't find a cleaner version than this rip from the radio, but the graininess kind of lends some grit. P.S. these electronic squiggles, blips, and clangs really jarred listeners who expected downtempo instrumental hip-hop from DJ Shadow.

4) Jaylib -- The Message
Ok, I lied. The other soundtrack to my Endless Summer '07 was the reissue of Jaylib's Champion Sound. Jaylib = J Dilla + Madlib, two of my fav producers. The album is comprised of nasty lo-fi hip-hop, with lots of vinyl noise, static, and rhythmic disjunctions. "The Message" is not one of the album's tracks, instead coming from a white label released by Stones Throw. It refers obliquely to an early Grandmaster Flash + The Furious Five single.

5) Child Rebel Soldiers aka Kanye West + Pharrell Williams + Lupe Fiasco -- US Placers
Oh geez. There have been super-vague rumors of an album-length collaboration between these three giants under the name Child Rebel Soldiers. This track comes from one of Kanye's mixtapes and contains a beat that rips from Thom Yorke's solo album The Eraser. So in the year that brought us In Rainbows, we also got our first Radiohead-hip-hop-crossover.

RIGHT CLICK + SAVE AS + ENJOY!

Very quiet around here lately...exams have become my life and will continue to occupy almost all of my time until mid-april.

anyway, in honor of Panda Bear's excellent new release, "Person Pitch", here's a link to an interview he did with Pitchfork. He gives a shoutout to "Donuts", by J Dilla, and to the Boss SP-303 (the older brother to my very own sampler, the Boss SP-202 aka Dr. Sample). It's great to see musicians as diverse as Panda Bear, Madlib, and Aa rocking this humble piece of gear. Did I mention that Dr. Sample is the super-secret third bandmember in Doubting Thomas?

Holla.

mmm, old donuts.

Not that I trust everything I read in Entertainment Weekly, but...

And while Idlewild, the new Outkast disc, might be kind of a disappointment, the new J Dilla album ("The Shining") is really nice.

Super excited about the new Idlewild album by Outkast and the posthumous J Dilla album, The Shining, both of which go on sale today.  The last J Dilla album, Donuts, has been blowing my mind since I bought it last January.  Consider it a major influence on anything that appears on the Audiozine.

 Also snagged the 3 LP Arthur Russell album "First Thought Best Thought" last Friday.  Check it out.

 Otherwise, finished moving out of my old apartment after a very long process and now catching up on schoolwork before getting back into Audiozine Volume 02 and various other projects.