Welcome (African?) Wizardry

I’m a little late sharing the good news of the John Wizards, a producer-singer duo from South Africa who put together my favorite recording of this year. But given that even some of my most musically voracious friends have still not heard them, I’m clearly not too late. So let me put it like this: […]

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Boys v. Girls

There’s been a lot of news in the past week about the legal kerfuffle between the Beastie Boys and a company called GoldieBlox, which markets science/engineering toys aimed at girls (and their parents) seeking something beyond the standard pink princess fare. Apparently, GoldieBlox has successfully leveraged the “viral” qualities of the net to project their […]

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+plus+

I’ve been following @emancan (aka, Emanuel Vinson, more recently recrowned as +) on Twitter for a few years now. In his early 20s, Emanuel is about as #based as it gets: persistently positive, open and encouraging, and utterly frank, especially when it comes to sources of inspiration or bullshit he needs to speak to from […]

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Funky Fungi, Homegrown & Delish

We recently enjoyed the fruits — or fruiting bodies, to be precise — of what has to be the yummiest and funkiest Kickstarter I’ve supported to date: loGROcal’s Sustainable Mushroom Farm in Austin, TX. The “Gourmet Oyster Mushroom Kit” I got for my $25 pledge arrived in the mail about a month ago. After following […]

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Animated Sheet Music

You know me, total sucker for musical visualization, so I was delighted to see Dan Cohen’s Animated Sheet Music come across my radar (h/t @samim). Whether or not you read Western notation, it’s easy to follow along with the animation (indeed, it makes a good score-reading exercise just to watch the bouncing notes). And there’s […]

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Picó’clock

Once again it’s that time! I’ll be guesting at Boston’s Best Dance Night™, Picó Picante, this Friday– Picó is always the ideal occasion to break out treacly dancehall pop covers, classic reggaeton, salsa remixes, and azonto jams, among others, so, yeah, pretty much always ready for that. And readers of W&W need no intro to […]

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Zunguzung Variations: Singer-Songwriter Edition

Here’s something primarily for longtime readers of W&W, or for random devotees to Yellowman’s timeless tune. As you all know, the melody from “Zunguzungunguzunguzeng” — aka “the Zigzagging Zunguzung meme” — has traveled widely. And I’ve been on the case ever since I first began hearing its echoes everywhere (which really started for me back […]

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To Make an Unforgivably Short Story Longer…

Thanks to all for passing around the raggamuffin hip-hop articles & mix. As it happens, the cosmos smiled on our cross-platform publication by arranging for a rather resonant listicle to appear at the bredrin-blog LargeUp just the next day: a Toppa Top 10 devoted to “Raggamuffin Gangster Rap“! West Coast examples of raggamuffin rap only […]

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Raggamuffin Hip-Hop Mega-Post!

illustration by Patrick Kyle for Cluster Mag I’m very happy to share some new work that involves quite a bit of collaboration: two articles and a truly epic mega-mix devoted to the rich, ruff-and-ready sound of raggamuffin hip-hop — aka, dancehall-derived flows over breakbeat-based beats (ca. 1987-94). It’s a distinctive and special repertory, near & […]

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Perfect Blue Gardens

Blue Gardens, the new release on Keysound Recordings, is the brainchild of a new musical talent who goes by the name E.m.m.a. Simply put, it’s some of the best music — and one of the more coherent albums and promising debuts — I’ve heard in years. My fave tracks are ones like “Shoot the Curl” […]

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Urb & Beach Boyz

This Friday, at the very #rare time of 5pm and at a rather lovely spot, I’m psyched to be opening for two of my favorite (erstwhile) local talents: Rizzla DJ & False Witness, the two from the #KUNQ crew who cooked up the time-warped, globally-warmed, zombie beach party of Isla Toxico — While we won’t […]

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Old Money, New Fire

Old friends Old Money Massive have released the best damn rap album I’ve heard in lightyears. Obvi, we’ve been fans at W&W since “African Kids” — and I’m happy to have had a little hand in bringing Old Money to Boston a couple times. They’ve been leaking flames in the form of tracks & videos […]

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Dembow Complex

In case you missed it, I recently published a piece in RBMA mag about the history of the Dembow, a history I’ve been working to tease apart and put together for a looooong time now. If you’re not familiar with RBMA, it stands for Red Bull Music Academy. And I was pretty happy to be […]

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Owed to Picó Picante

Tonight is the 2 year anniversary of Picó Picante, one of the shining lights of Boston’s club scene, and something I’ve been grateful to be close to — The pics of me at Picó over the years attest to the special vibes of the place (even when I’m seemingly giving the stankface to someone making […]

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Virtual Rites of Spring

Wow, this is quite an amazing piece of work. Stephen Malinowski collaborated with Jay Bacal to make an animated graphical score of Stravinsky’s controversial classic. I love tracking music this way, far more interesting than a static and graphically impoverished waveform. Now that’s what I call technomusicology! Malinowski and Bacal have carefully pegged shapes and […]

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Panel People, Can Y’all Get Funky?

For anyone who missed our panel last week and would like to check out our conversation, I’m happy to report that it’s been archived here. But here’s an embed for your viewing ease — Video streaming by Ustream Thanks again to my eloquent interlocutors, all of whom had colorful stories & trenchant perspectives to share, […]

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Coca Cola Bokkle Cipher

Amazingly — given I didn’t know it has existed for a decade — my mellow Marvin Hall dropped a YouTube bomb last night in a comment on my recent re-post, “School Bell Nuh Ring“: he actually has video of the awesome impromptu dancehall freestyle session that the students from St. Andrew’s broke into on the […]

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Grassroots Digital

The 2013 Together Fest is underway, and I’ll be playing my part on 2 occasions Thursday (tomorrow!). First, on Thurs afternoon from 2-3:30pm at the Together Center in Central Square (328 Mass Ave), I’ll be moderating a panel called “Grassroots Digital” featuring three luminaries in the weird world of mediation between DIY/independent and industrial modes […]

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Love Limited

Remember when I asked — rhetorically and remixically — whether there were limits to your love for Soundcloud? Well, it took a little over two years, but the super smart sample-sniffers over at Audible Magic have apparently finally decided that one of the two mashups I made by way of commentary / limit-testing should be […]

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Let’s Get CVLT, Let’s Get TGTHR

Got two great gigs in the next couple weeks that I want to make a little bit of a big deal about! First up, next Monday (May 6) at Middlesex, I’m excited to take a turn as a guest at CVLT, Cambridge / Boston’s semimonthly source for “Electronic Death Music” (as they put it) — […]

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