New Music Tuesday #65

Jose James, Durand Bernarr, The Pharcyde & ephemeral remixes

February is almost done clogging up our calendar with awards shows (NAACP, Independent Spirit and Sceen Actor’s Guild was just this week!) and giving us spurts of extremely erratic weather. The month itself doesn’t feel like it’s moving at light speed or dragging it’s feet which is pretty rare for me. Overall I had a pretty productive week and I even went to a few events for fun!

I hit up The Record Club’s listening session for D’Angelo’s Voodoo album and The Donut Lounge to check out my homie Fresh Kil’s beat set and was blown away by all the talent in the room. I came home from both events very inspired to work on my own stuff!

Shouting at the Screen was super fun and almost sold out! We showed Truck Turner to our special guest Jean Grae and I think she loved it as much as we do. It’s a pretty wild film with some even wilder death scenes and Nichelle Nichols (aka Uhura from Star Trek) really steals the show.

It’s really hard to capture the energy of the night on a phone but here is a short clip to give you an idea of just how much fun it is.

Thank you for coming through if you were there and if you couldn’t make it your next chance will be sometime in May. Hit that link if you wanna follow us on Instagram and/or sign up for the mailing list.

And speaking of shows….

SHOWS

Feb 25 - Trivmatic - If you’re reading this on Tuesday and are in Brooklyn you should come to BierWax for some good ole hip hop trivia hosted by Jim Search. I’ll be spinning a vinyl hip hop set which means about 70% Tanya Morgan related material. FREE

Mar 1 - Franklin Park - First Saturday of the Month and I’ll be running a few jams at Franklin Park. They have great food and enough room to dance so if you want to bring a party of people through to cut a rug feel free! FREE

Mar 3 - Too Much Rap - I’ll be live on East Village Radio from 4p - 6p EST playing some rap jams. You can listen/watch live on the website and there’s even a chat room.

Mar 3 - Frankenstein’s Baby -Right after my EVR set I’ll be hustling over to Union Hall to man the decks alongside Joyelle Johnson and Tyrone Thornhill. The line-up includes Chris Gethard, Jacob Williams, Mia Jackson, Marie Faustin and Amir Gollan. TICKETS

On Valentine’s Day I spun a set with Mekdot at Bunton’s World Famous. It was full of R&B jams, dirty mack anthems and sing-along moments. If you want to imagine you are at a party in deep Brooklyn you can listen to it here

NEWS

I try and use this space to talk about music I am excited about or interested in because sharing stuff you don’t like is like giving somebody a cold. I don’t want to deliberately pass along a bad experience to people! But some stuff is just so extraordinarily bad that you’ve gotta direct a little attention to it to spread awareness about it. In other words I experienced it so you don’t have to.

I have a really high tolerance for bad music of all sorts and close friends know this so from time to time they will put me up on cringe-worthy songs and artists or cross-over attempts by non-artists. Which is how I found out that Lara Trump has a song with French Montana.

The song itself is bad. Not holy shit bad but more heavily processed vocal with 0 personality bad. It honestly sounds like it could be something somebody wanted to pitch to J-Lo. The thing that gives it that extra ounce of terrible (aside from Lara Trump LMAO) is French Montana just randomly being there? Like the fuck is this nigga doing? I don’t know him or his personal politics but I feel like he’s more apolitical and pro-paycheck than pro-trump but I could be wrong because I refuse to do any further Googling on this topic.

This lead me to discover that sentient skid-mark Tom MacDonald got Rosenne Barr rapping on a song with a headful of vacation braids. Now this song is terrible in a way that only humans can be terrible. Roseanne goes on a slurfest in the middle of her ‘verse’ and Tom brings his usual race-baiting bullshit bars.

I highly recommend ignoring both of these songs unless you are as morbid ly curious about terrible music by terrible people.

Okay let’s get to some good music that I actually want you to listen to.

VIDEOS

There’s a DeBarge documentary coming and based on this teaser it’s going to be a tough watch. More info here

Ms Hill and Wyclef did this mini-doc about their SNL 50 performance and it culminates in a quick little freestyle. L Boogie still beastin!

Apparently Pharrell did a short film for adidas a while back and it featured this random Pusha T song that somebody clipped and uploaded to their youtube page.

Jose James and the Rainbow Blonde crew put together this fun Kung-Fu video for the single to his upcoming album.

It’s also worth noting that Jose and his wife

Taali

(who has an incredible substack) lost everything to the Eaton fire. Their GoFundMe is like $7K shy of meeting it’s goal and if you have it to contribute you can do so here.

ALBUMS

Durand Bernarr dropped an album that I haven’t heard because I just found out about it.

I saw TROX talking about this album on his IG and gave it a skim. It’s a compilation album made by Albina records granting producers access to their archives to flip, edit and remix the catalog.

I don’t know much about the source material but the beats they made from it are pretty dope.

SINGLES

My mind still can’t process Gavin Turek being a woman but I guess that’s how some people feel about Tanya Morgan so I get it. The song is jamming.

I heard DJ Tara playing this on her radio show and had to track it down immediately. Turns. out it’s a Jon Reyes edit of a Quadron cover.

That made me wonder what Quadron had been up to and after a light googling I found out that Robin Hannibal had this remix out.

Dave East put out an album with Ransom and they got Jay Electronica on a song.

A friend of the newsletter sent me this Pharcyde song. It’s a few years old but I had never heard it before so I’m sharing it here.

BONUS

I have been playing with my samplers a lot lately. Namely the Teenage Engineering KO2. I really enjoy using their stuff* and mostly because it’s so portable and easy to travel with. Once you get the workflow down it’s super easy to sketch out ideas.

I usually record the beats into my phone’s camera app and text them to a few friends. It’s been my low pressure way of getting feedback and the feeling of sharing work without the pressure of releasing it**.

Since I fell short of my goal of dropping some music before the month was up here is the latest beat that I texted to a few folks. This one has vocals from my project Sketchpad because the homie yU suggested that I add an accapella to see how it sounded.

Drop a comment and let me know what you think!

**If anyone from Teenage Engineering is reading this I need that full Field Quartet or just the TX-6 and TP-7!

*I am a firm believer of the art being in the process and the end result merely being documentation of the process. That’s where the pressure comes from. The need to make sure that the result captures the fun or skill of the process. This is why making these lil videos and texting them to the homies is fun for me.