like the moon
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 […]
Read More →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 […]
Read More →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 […]
Read More →It’s a little astounding that this March marks 8 years of Beat Research. In celebration, we’ve managed to line up quite a month+ of very exciting guests, from locally beloved to internationally renowned. Indeed, the next 6 sessions will feature no fewer than 3 local DJs, 3 acts from NYC, and a couple exciting visitors […]
Read More →Ok, mis local locos, tonight’s the night! We’re kicking off the Together Festival 2011 with none other than Geko Jones, Dutty Artz bredrin and co-host of Que Bajo?!, NYC’s awesomest Afro-Latin dance party (& honestly, probably the best night I’ve ever had the pleasure to play at). Do come out and welcome Geko to town […]
Read More →I’m happy to announce, and not a moment too soon, that I’ve arranged some festive music for today. When I put together my first St. Patrick’s Day mix some years ago, it was an obviously tongue-in-cheek gesture. You might recall that I began with House of Pain before bringing in the romping stomp of the […]
Read More →Following up on recent posts, I decided to do a little looking into how many remixes of James Blake’s “Limit to Your Love” currently reside on SoundCloud. I confess that I stopped after combing through 20 pages of returns for my (somewhat sweeping) search, though SoundCloud indicated that there were another 30 pages or so! […]
Read More →How many times do we need to be SoundClowned before we get wise? Back in late December, tellingly/suspiciously right in the midst of the holiday vacation lull, SoundCloud started sending out the same sort of automated take-down notices to its users that YouTube has been using for years. Mix-style DJs and remix producers found certain […]
Read More →The following text is the comment I delivered as the discussant for Steven Feld’s presentation this past Friday at Sensing the Unseen, a year-long seminar at MIT seeking “to join more familiar attention to material culture with an innovative focus on immaterial culture” in order to explore, in a variety of ways, the realm of […]
Read More →I’m really gonna give this subject a rest soon, but let me attempt a slightly more oblique approach. One dimension of the underlying critique in Grant’s comments seeks to draw lines of value and authenticity between what he wants to position as a kind of first-order cultural production (doing/making stuff) and second-order skimming (talking about […]
Read More →a once-obscure music that enjoyed a fanatic embrace in the _______ slums of _______ has become a full-fledged global occasion – This could be the mantra of global ghettotech. Could hardly have written it better myself. But I didn’t. Nor was it written, despite what might be its commonplace connotations, about reggae, or funk carioca, […]
Read More →One of our guests tonight at Beat Research is Baltimore’s Sam Hopkins, aka Balagan, who promises to bring quite a (digital/digitized) crate with him. He might mix things up like — The great pic above comes from a piece Sam just published in Wax Poetics about searching for vinyl in Casablanca. Allow me to snip […]
Read More →here’s looking at me Apropos of noticing, this marks the 700th post since I moved this blog to my own server, way back in October 2006 — almost exactly 4 years ago, and well before Google/Blogspot starting alienating users en-masse. That’s a lotta posts, and I want to thank all of you who read here […]
Read More →dude is dead serious We’re happy to welcome Kingdom back to Beat Research this coming Monday, Sept. 13. Readers of this blog need no intro to one of the dopest producers/DJs working the decks in the global bass scene these days. But if you haven’t checked his latest EP, That Mystic (Night Slugs), you need […]
Read More →I’m reposting this, originally published to the now-defunct Riddim Meth0d site back in January 2006, in tribute to Seymour, who passed away earlier this week. A long overdue part 2 will follow… i don’t think we’re in rockville center anymore with this champagne-bust of a post then, we embark. and hence we commence our sonicultural […]
Read More →Considering the prodigious and idiosyncratically imaginative output of Mr. Munchi, it’s seeming more and more apt to call what he’s doing something like a genre unto itself. Moombahcore? Nah, Munchiton! Just yesterday I was flipping over his Amen-breaking, dembow-dripped, synth-cackle, “Datsik – Firepower (Munchi Moombahcore Rmx).” And then this morning I find the following in […]
Read More →Munchi follows up his moombahton splurge with some flashbacks — i totally forgot to send you some tracks i worked on in late 2009 that were bubbling but influenced by dominican music. like perico ripiao, bachata or dominican dembow. i had these finished but i was working on a whole concept thing there. Munchi – […]
Read More →[Ok, while I’m grinding on non-bloggy things, let me keep things moving here by offering up another from the riddimmeth0d vaults. I’m happy to report that I’ve since discovered more info about the origins of “Bird In Hand” here, which points out that the female singer on “Milte hi aankhein dil huwa” (from the 1950 […]
Read More →a moomba, apparently — no relation to afrojack, i don’t think Reggaeton doesn’t die, it just continues to fragment and reconstitute in a thousand different ways. (Sorry about the passive language there — I don’t think reggaeton has viral/memetic agency, but I still find myself using that sort of shorthand/emphasis even when what I want […]
Read More →A few recent projects of note landed in my inbox last week. And though I don’t have the time to really give them the write-ups they deserve (and don’t get me started on the backlog of projects I need to big-up), they each grabbed my attention — a remarkable feat in this age of info-glut […]
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