JAGA JAZZIST [NORWAY]
oslo skyline direct download
if you have yet to check into the jaga jazzist hotel, you’ve missed out on a great deal up until now. never fear, their new album ‘what we must’ is a great jumping-on point. released through the norwegian label smalltown supersound and via ninja tune, it represents some of their most accessible material to date. a ten-piece featuring a core team of three horntveth family members, the band released their first material back in 1994, when some of them were only 14 years old. in the intervening years, their releases have met with incredible acclaim, particularly the 2003 album ‘the stix’. where that album carried a degree of electronic production, adding beats and samples to their trademark guitar / horns / drums sound, ‘what we must’ is their self-confessed “rock album”. for me, there’s an immediate connection with last year’s excellent tortoise album ‘it’s all around you’ – swathes of guitar-driven melody married with amazing horns and jazz drumming played at a pounding pace, it really does leave you breathless. ‘what we must’ along with caribou‘s ‘milk of human kindness’ and four tet‘s ‘everything ecstatic’ are shaping up to be the three key instrumental albums of 2005. a further six mp3s from earlier releases can be found on their site here.
PLANETAKIS [GERMANY]
mike patton mp3
in which cologne-based duo jenny and robert drive a stake through the pretty-boy heart of electro pop, spiking it up with deutsche grammar, abrupt guitar and old school analogue drums! i can’t quite tell you what the song is about other than it does have the words ‘faith no more’ in the chorus, so i have to assume it is actually all about mr patton himself. jenny’s brother has made them a video, and brings with him some polished cred having shot clips for sven vath and miss kittin. honestly, i love this shit – goddam germans, they do it for me every time. a whole album’s worth of mp3s can be grabbed from planetakis.de.
TIME [US: COLORADO]
hungreed mp3
thanks dad sorry mom mp3
time is a solo hip hop producer from denver, who – at the ripe old age of 20 – has dropped his debut album ‘litterture’. if i tell you that his collaborations and supports stretch to aesop rock, anticon, sole, themselves, lyrics born, diverse and their ilk, you can see that we’re playing in territory that i’ve embarassingly once referred to as alt.hip hop. crass though it sounds, some sort of marker is obviously required to differentiate time and folks such as anticon from the bling-bores that are hogging valuable shelf-space in record stores around the world. time, the self-titled ‘crunktastic rap geek’, crops up in an interview on urbansmarts.com and has this to say about genre definitions: “hip hop is dickriding, bullshit, patronizers and politics. it’s pot heads, fake revolutionaries and alcoholic kids. i think hip hop (music) is a label. a lot of people separate hip hop and rap. it’s too hard to segregate everything. i could be labeled as rap because i say chain or crunk and i could be labeled as hip hop if i talk about spray paint and b-boys, yo! the music business is one sided and frustrating but when you get to the bare bones of it, it’s all music.” so there you have it. check out time and some of his fellow mcs at dirtylaboratory.com and those north of mexico can catch him on a u.s. tour this month with pedestrian and telephone jim jesus.
in the mail: some good folks who’ve emailed fat planet of late >> uk-based electronica / experimental sound artist, ascoltare, is kindly giving away a four-track mp3 of brand new material. discordant organs meets glitch meets pure abstraction – simultaneously disconcerting and lush. // subscribe to the modular newsletter and download a recent dj mix from cut copy, recorded for radio one // new ambient – alt.world release from gamma ray blast from portugal, via the test-tube label – or cut straight to the mp3 // washington-based electro pop artist chris price sent over his sweet’n’smart new track charge me up – “got my finger in the socket and i can’t get enough” – more info on his site // from the man who gave us so many greap warp videos, chris cunningham has a new dvd / book package out, with music by aphex twin , entitled rubber johnny // fellow-warp man jamie liddel does his own inimitable thang live on stage in london on this short movie.