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The Last Poet: Gil Scott-Heron is still the first name on the rhyme scene

Feature
Wax Poetics
Issue 42
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Gil Scott-Heron doesn’t suffer no fools. During an afternoon phone call from his office in New York, the 61-year-old author and performer fielded interview questions with the same combination of humor, bluntness and insight that have made his poetry, novels and lyrics so valued and influential over the last four decades. When asked about his relationship with hip-hop, he replied, “I haven’t seen hip-hop lately. I see rappers as individuals.” While I was trying to ferret out information about his forthcoming book, The Last Holiday, he told me he has 628 pages right now, and while he’d love to talk about each and every one of them, he’ll let everyone read the book themselves. Towards the end of our conversation, he said “I told you everything except my DNA. Don’t you think you have enough for a story?”

His patience may have been tested, but his capacity for storytelling was barely tapped. Born in Chicago and raised in Tennessee and the Bronx, Scott-Heron’s literary ambitions and social conscience quickly manifested themselves. After writing a novel in 1968 at age 19, The Vulture, Scott-Heron began a long musical career with the release of Small Talk at 125th & Lennox in 1970. He’s collaborated with musicians such as Brian Jackson, Malcolm Cecil and industry legends like Bob Thiele and Clive Davis. The influence of his blend of socio-political commentary and R&B and soul — as heard on seminal tracks like “The Bottle” and “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” — has never waned and is in face considered a key element in the evolution of hip-hop. But Scott-Heron’s recent recorded output was sparse until the release of I’m New Here, which came out earlier this year. A set of modern tracks paired with the poet’s frank observations, it was a pet project of XL Recordings’ owner Richard Russell that found its genesis in Russell’s 2006 visit to see Scott-Heron at Rikers Island, where he was serving time for cocaine possession. Scott-Heron’s baritone voice may have aged, but his focus and literary integrity will never go out of style.
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Interview: Diplo

Interview
Pitchfork
July 26, 2010
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“If you rated someone’s popularity by how much hate they get from journalists, I’m fucking super-popular.”

Wesley Pentz– better known as DJ, producer, and Mad Decent label boss Diplo– dropped that quote near the conclusion of this interview, which might suggest he’s got a problem with the media. But considering the breadth of his activities, from recruiting artists like Po Po and Bosco Delrey to making new Major Lazer tracks, Diplo seems more interested in his own creative projects and being part of the media instead of wasting time worrying about it.

“I’d love to take a year off to do strictly film work,” he says. “That seems to reach a lot more people. When I do music, it’s got a huge voice and gets to people immediately. Film reaches so many more people, especially when you do a film about music. You can actually get out there and understand the fundamentals of what’s going on in these different scenes.”

Speaking over Skype from Taiwan, Diplo appeared to be multi-tasking as usual. He said he was performing at a club called Luxy the following night, but spent the day at the studios of Apple Daily, the company that made the bizarre and popular animated Tiger Woods news report video, to get his own video made for a collaboration with Lil Jon. We spoke to him about building a label, the evolution of baile funk, and why he doesn’t care about M.I.A.’s politics.

Pitchfork: One of the founders of VICE said there’s now a universality of youth culture, that the internet and media can bring together kids from the middle of Kansas and Italy who have similar interests. But is there also a flip side to this kind of globalization, the homogenization of these different scenes?
Diplo: I can give you two examples. I just did a compilation of dubstep for Mad Decent. Not the best or the truest, but the stuff I like. It’s so diverse: stuff like Rusko that’s straightforward or the stuff like that’s more hardcore, like this Canadian kid Datsik. I wrote in the liner notes about the dubstep scene and how it had grown simultaneously across the world, because kids were doing the same forms and sharing the same techniques at the same time.
But you can see, even in London, there are like six different kinds of dubstep. There’s the emo vibe, the hardcore vibe, and the more techno-y vibe. It’s one of the first scenes that grew globally and came up around the world at the same time. You have kids from Israel, New Zealand, there are big scenes everywhere. Sometimes you can’t even tell how it’s connected, sometimes you can’t tell it’s dubstep. Guys like DJ Mujava from South Africa say they make house music. To me it doesn’t even sound like that. To me, you can’t take away…

Pitchfork: Geography?
Diplo: The connection to people. When someone does it just to make it and it sounds like a carbon copy, I can hear that right away. When it’s really weird and mixed up, that’s exciting to me. I’ve done more shows in Indonesia in the last two years than I’ve done in Philly. And the kids there are crazy, the DJs are great and up to date with the newest music. The producers there are giving me the best demos I’ve gotten all year. It takes one or two people.
Another good example is Proxy from Russia. It’s just him and a couple friends from the suburbs making heavy sounds like an amplified car engine. There are pluses and minuses. The minus is a lot of kids do it because they want to do it. I get so many demos and usually the stuff I give to the Mad Decent kids is the good stuff at the end. If I had to listen to everything it would be too much, but the good stuff does rise to the top.
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Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes, Jamie Lidell Creates Electrified Soul From Eclectic Studio Sessions And A Series Of Bad Breaks

Feature
EQ
June 2010
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Compass, the latest album from live-wire musician Jamie Lidell, finds the pitch-shifting, melody-looping extrovert experiencing a catharsis. Grasping for solid ground after suffering what he calls a “triple whammy”—the dissolution of a relationship, a change in management, and a move from Berlin to New York— he set down and in the course of a month, wrote his own version of “good, old-fashioned relationship blues.”

“It left me to reinvent myself with all the joy and pain and the freedom to think and deal with the fear and shit that got stirred up,” Lidell says. “It’s the deepest blues I’ve ever felt. But music is a really sweet healer.”

Raw performances aside, the classic sentiment expressed throughout Compass [Warp] was built from technology-enabled, studio-hopping collaborations. Production was done at multiple studios. There were collaborations with Beck and others at the famed Ocean Way complex in Hollywood. Meanwhile, musician Chilly Gonzales and Wilco multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansone contributed backing parts remotely via online file sharing, and Lidell recorded synth parts on his Sequential Circuits Prophet-5 in his apartment.
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Rusko: O.M.G.!

Review
Pitchfork
July 2, 2010
Link
6.7

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Perez Hilton doesn’t spend much time on the dubstep beat, but in mid-May, the Queen of All Media blogged about Rusko’s contributions to the forthcoming Britney Spears album. Britney was the obvious link bait, but as word of the collaboration spread, it created Rorschach-like responses about the producer’s role– whether he was a blatant sell-out or a genre ambassador to the masses– and fed into anxiety/happiness over the scene’s increasing popularity. The recent L.A. transplant had already remixed or produced for Kid Sister, M.I.A., and Basement Jaxx. Working with the former pop princess seemed to test his recent exhortation that dubstep is “the punk rock of the electronic-music world.” But the spiky-haired Brit would probably be the first to say ditch pretension and politics, get hyped, and just jump in the pit and have fun.

From the start of O.M.G.!— which opens with a celebratory “woo!” that punctuates redlining, wall-of-bass lead single “Woo Boost”– Rusko dives in headfirst, rolling forward on distended low end while occasionally stepping into new territory. He bounces between the laid-back digital dub of “Rubadub Shakedown” and “District Line”, more uptempo and ravey territory on “Kumon Kumon”, and the Gucci Mane collaboration “Got Da Groove”, a successful fusion of strutting beats and a bulbous bass line. As for that Britney collab, he could do a lot worse than “Hold On”, a decent though stretched-out two-step rhythm that shines light on the versatility of Dirty Projectors’ Amber Coffman.

But over the course of the entire album, O.M.G.! doesn’t live up to its breathless title, coming off more as a disjointed dance survey course than anything game-changing. Sheer massiveness can be visceral, and Rusko has certainly pushed that idea forward with singles like “Cockney Thug”. But he can also slip into hyperactive and cartoonish territory (parts of “I Love You” sound like a very slowed-down version of the chattering aliens from “Sesame Street”). And fusing blown-out bass lines with stock parts from other genres– the trancey build-ups of “You’re on My Mind Baby” and “I Love You” or cheesy club-lite of “Feels So Real”– doesn’t add up to much. Rusko still puts together some moving, visceral moments, but here, they seem fleeting, good ideas in search of a vision.

Site Unseen: Two locations scouts name their favorite Chicago spots filmmakers may have missed

Feature
A.V. Club Chicago
June 30, 2010
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Our iconic architecture, crowning skyline, and diverse neighborhoods practically dare cinematographers to resist its charms. Not surprisingly, film history is dotted with iconic Chicago moments, from Jake and Elwood of Blues Brothers careening over the Skyway bridge to Cameron Frye from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off contemplating Seurat at the Art Institute. Surely a city as sprawling as ours has plenty of hidden treasures untouched and undiscovered by film crews.

According to Susan Doll—a professor of film history at Oakton College, writer/researcher at Facets Multi-Media, and blogger for Turner Classic Movies—you’d be hard-pressed to find a part of the city that hasn’t been used in a film, and not just because of productions like The Dark Knight or even Call Northside 777, a 1948 crime drama starring Jimmy Stewart that showcased the city’s grit. Chicago was a legitimate center of the film industry around World War I. In the 1890s, William Selig opened a factory in Chicago to manufacture film equipment and later started making his own motion pictures, and in 1907, George Spoor and Broncho Billy Anderson founded Essanay Pictures in Uptown. That doesn’t even begin to factor in the contributions of independent African-American filmmakers of that period, including those working for the William Foster Photoplay Company and director Oscar Micheaux, who made a picture called Within Our Gates in 1920 that included an intense lynching scene (the year after the National Guard was called to Chicago to quell race riots).

“We couldn’t come up with anything,” Doll says. “Every time we came up with something, someone could name a film shot there. There have been about 2,000 films shot in the city since the film-school era in the ’60s.”

Sounds like a challenge, doesn’t it? The A.V. Club spoke with a pair of Chicago location scouts—Al Cohn, who worked on Eagle Eye and is working on Transformers 3, and Steven A. Jones, who worked on Henry, Portrait Of A Serial Killer and Mad Dog And Glory —and asked them to name great places in the city to film action sequences that haven’t been seen in a film before. Here are their choices.
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Interview: Flying Lotus

Feature
Pitchfork
June 14, 2010
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Flying Lotus (Steve Ellison) comes across as gregarious and buoyant as his beats; lithe and animated on stage, the L.A. hip-hop head would be infectious even if you couldn’t hear a thing. It’s no surprise his music and personality have made him fixed point in a constantly expanding global network of creative producers, in some cases linked through the Low End Theory night and his own Brainfeeder label. He tackles more celestial connections on his new album Cosmogramma, completed in the wake of his mother’s death. Adding layers of emotional and musical complexity– including string arrangements, harp and saxophone from his cousin Ravi Coltrane– the record shows Ellison making a cathartic and creative leap, his own unique contribution to his family’s spiritual discography.

On the phone from his apartment in Echo Park, Flying Lotus spoke with Pitchfork about the genesis of Cosmogramma, being an extra in American Beauty, and Sundays with Aunt Alice.

Pitchfork: With everything you’ve been doing in the last few years, when did you find the time to record Cosmogramma? When was it made and where did you do it?

Flying Lotus: I did all of it in my apartment in Los Angeles. I started right after the Los Angeles album came out, but I didn’t really have a direction for it at the time. It kind of took shape over a year and a half.

Pitchfork: There’s a lot of live instrumentation on the album from working with the bassist Thundercat and arranger Miguel Atwood-Ferguson. Was this something you always wanted to do, to go down this path and incorporate these instruments?

FL: Absolutely. That was the goal from the get-go, to have this hybrid of sounds. It’s just been a matter of finding the right people. I try to have sessions with folks and it never really gels. I feel like I finally found the right way to communicate, too. I think I’m better than I was when I first started.
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Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings: Made In The Moment

Feature
EQ
April 29, 2010
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Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings showcase the instinctual way Daptone does soul with I Learned the Hard Way.

The Daptone story already has its share of legendary characters: There’s bassist/producer/co-owner Gabriel Roth, who turned a two-story house into a recording studio for the Daptone Records label; then there are the Dap-Kings, who collectively played on Amy Winehouse’s sophomore album, Back to Black; and of course there’s the prison guard–turned–electric soul singer, Sharon Jones.

One lesser known—but no less important—of these characters is Chief Tape Operator Wayne Gordon, who’s had a hand in all of Daptone’s releases. A warm studio presence decked out in a white lab coat, Gordon has spent hours threading up an Ampex AG-440B tape machine, marking reels of RMG SM911 tape with a silver Sharpie and splicing together tracks with an X-ACTO knife. His presence alongside Roth helps explain why the music being recorded in Daptone strikes a special chord.

“I’d done a lot of digital recording work, but nothing of this magnitude [in analog],” Gordon says. “It’s suddenly like playing for the ’72 Dolphins. I was in college before, and now I’m in the pros.”
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To Rococo Rot: Speculation

Review
Pitchfork
April 13, 2010
Link
7.6

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To Rococo Rot’s skill lies in making electronic-infused post-rock engaging where most other bands fiddling with sculpted synths and cyclic bass lines settle for crafting something tasteful. Berliners Stefan Schneider and Ronald and Robert Lippok often sound as balanced and precise as their reversible band name. But they know how to finesse electronic timbres and human melodies, neither over-intellectualizing nor over-sentimentalizing their songs. What makes Speculation so welcome is that it represents a tweak to their established M.O. nearly 15 years into their career.

Recording sessions for Speculation, some of which were held in the rural studio of Krautrock legends Faust, succeeded in capturing a more live sound and looser atmosphere. Previous tracks have always been well composed. New ones like “Working Against Time” add bright cosmic rhythms and a sense of immediacy to the mix, as if you can feel the air move in the room between the synths and guitars. That song in particular has a swagger to it; synths pulse against a persistent beat, as if in reference to the title. Credit Stefan Schneider’s bass playing with plenty of propulsion and muscle, especially the dark, skuzzy tone on “Away” or the bouncy middle section of “Seele”.

Hotel Morgen, the trio’s previous record, wasn’t nearly as energetic; momentum was sometimes slow to establish itself (and quick to fade) and the short closer, “Opak”, was an awkward send-off. Speculation sounds much tighter, confidently moving between tracks and themes. The digital tones the band has been playing with for years sound richer yet also lighter, supporting soaring cyclical melodies.

The growing sense of looseness culminates in the epic, nearly 11-minute jam “Friday”, which includes the mad organ playing of Faust’s Jochen Irmler fiddling away on a homemade instrument. It’s relatively unhinged for the group, yet they keep pace, enriching this particular freakout with bubbling cauldrons of noise, brusque tones and beats. It never quite boils over, as if the group’s cool, calm hand still has sway. The music of To Rococo Rot has always had an organic element; Speculation furthers that with a real sense of play and exploration.

Herbert: One One

Review
Pitchfork
April 12, 2010
Link
7.6

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While Matthew Herbert’s methods of recording audio samples are inspiring and outlandish, he always captures a bit of the human element. It’s not just because his discography includes a noisy digestive tract turned into a euphoric house melody; there’s an appreciation for randomness, mistakes, and chaos that runs through his work. On his new solo album, One One, an artist who weaves multiple meanings into his music through contextual sampling strips down to a single source: himself.

At first, it seems like a playful volley in Herbert’s game of dissecting music, politics, and theory. The first of a trio of conceptual releases, including One Pig (composed strictly of sounds from one pig) and One Club (sampled crowd noise from a club), One One focuses more on instruments and is 100% Herbert, including his own intimate vocals. It’s a solo record simple and straightforward, less of a concept than we’re used to from someone who can turn a rhythm track into an arch-consumerist critique. What then is the difficulty, statement, or challenge when an acclaimed producer makes his own album?

As with many things Herbert, it’s not that easy or simple. A quieter, stripped-down approach to his typically tight rhythms and rich tones, One One has a deceptively relaxed vibe. It may be the rural studio that it was recorded in, or it may be Herbert being more introspective (just listen to him sing about home on “Berlin”). He knows how to get the most out of his source material, and when that happens to be his own voice, he plays it cool or sticks to gentle, simple melodies. He doesn’t showcase substantial range or a hidden talent, but Herbert does demonstrate a lack of artifice, self-awareness, and variety.”Singapore” shines with a bright, folksy vibe and retro vocal harmonies. On the slow-burning single “Leipzig”, his detached storytelling style fits the song’s slinky, clubland theme.

While it’s conceptually all about one man, by the end of the ten heartfelt tracks, it doesn’t feel as personally revealing as it does poignant. Maybe it’s because the self-contained solo project is more subtle overall, with poetic, yet still political, lyrics (“And with the rising of the seas/ Mouths will be open/ And with the drying of the fields/ Everything will be gone”). Herbert met the challenge of ditching some experimental baggage and being more straightforward; he doesn’t always need an elaborate platform or sonic ruse to say something worth hearing.

American Pastoral: Digital Recording Tools Helped Midlake Record Airy Folk Jams

Feature
EQ Magazine
April 2010
Link

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The music of Denton, Texas, band Midlake sounds labored over in the best possible way, an artful, sepia-toned style of folk rock exuding the craftsmanship of a handwritten manuscript. But the band’s airy, languid delivery masks the precise arrangements and extensive effort expended during composition and recording. Making The Courage of Others [Bella Union], the follow-up to the band’s 2006 breakthrough The Trials of Van Occupanther, took more than a year and a half, including a side trip to the Sand Hill Farm in Buffalo, Texas, to shake up recording sessions after frustration had metastasized.

“The studio was getting quite dark, and there were bad vibes in there from so many failures every day,” admits frontman Tim Smith. “It felt like we needed to get away.”

The work done on that farm set the stage for final recording at the group’s small hometown studio in Denton. British folk music like Pentangle and Fairport Convention and the guitar tones on American singer-songwriter Jimmie Spheeris’ debut album Isle of View, seeped into the new songs, according to Smith. The bulk of the album was tracked as the band played together—as opposed to overdubheavy Van Occupanther—with the drummer in the main room and other members performing in the control and storage rooms. On “Rulers, Ruling All Things,” a subtle bass thump, winsome drums, and guitar and flute melodies are as intertwined as a Celtic knot. But it wasn’t recorded with the kind of acoustic and vintage equipment one might expect.
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