moodmat

Been getting into some dubstep (thanks Dan…) as a sort of backwater drift trying to get upstream or anywhere near other things that sound as good as Burial and some of the other Hyperdub releases. It’s not easy, but fun feeling out new territory and finding the dub veins worth mining or abandoning. Picked up [...]

Five points to the first person who gets the inside joke in the subject header. And now it’s time for a look back at recent box set purchases that I have made recently in my mind: Miles Davis- The Complete On The Corner Sessions Calling this Complete On The Corner is a bit of a [...]

Chris Gray is one of those guys in the history of Chicago who never really asked for his 15 minutes of spotlight time in the annals of Chicago music history; nor is he one to immediately through a petulant fit or espouse righteous truths how about things “really went down” “back in the day”. Gray [...]

The festivals may be over, but there is still fun to be had over at the 2007 South By Southwest site. Do you like free? 739 songs, in a 3.1 gig torrent. It’s the same drill as last year around here — listen to all the tracks, write a bit about the standouts. You can [...]

(Spectral) Minimal. As the name for a genre, I could go off on it for a week. It’s inherently limiting and the exceptions are all over the place. How Jeff Mills and his symphony of TR-727 sounds have been included in the past is beyond me. The term just fails to capture the nuance and [...]

Our old friends, Detroit’s unexploitable Underground Resistance crew, recommends a great shortlist of inspiring books at the blurry crossroads of rebel music, racial/cultural identity, and individualist ethos. UR namechecks a few from Langston Hughes to Tejumola Olaniyan’s profile of Fela Kuti and Moodmat founder Dan Sicko’s “Techno Rebels: The Renegades of Electronic Funk”. What do [...]

*Editor’s note: Inspired by the music, this is my first iTunes store review. It is re-presented here to allow me to establish ownership and as well, to draw attention to the tactile (CD) version which in November will be available at various outlets thanks to Clone distribution. The legacy and influence of Bob Moog may [...]

*Editor’s note: I wrote a much smaller version of this for the company blog a while back. It’s since disappeared from the Googleverse, so I felt compelled to breathe a little life into it. If bedroom hip-hop producers are dime-a-dozen biscuits, Detroit’s Jason Hogans is a monstrous birthday cake, busting out of the display case. [...]

It’s always a good thing when you’re moved so much by a track that you just spontaneously want to write about it, and subsequently discover that it’s freely and legally available for download. Ilkae’s first splash was the wonderful Pistachio Island, which packed 45 skittery, delightful tracklets into about an hour, and topped at least [...]

Just because I’m on the myspace wagon, one should not assume I do not appreciate a good social-networking web tool as much as any other Internet tech geek [web tool?] does. All self-deprecation aside, last.fm’s redesign just emerged from beta and exploded into the public eye with a superman strength update which they have been [...]

Label: !K7 I fully intended to wrap my head around Kieran Hebden’s installment in the DJ Kicks series much sooner. I could blame my recent work schedule, but that’s not a “mood” worth exploring. Processing all of the feelings and new contexts through which I was experiencing the music is really the culprit. Bear with [...]

Putting aside the fact that my own personal “conventional wisdom” meter reading for myspace has dropped through the floor, I must admit that my latest musical obsession was discovered right there amid the obese background images, auto-triggered audio, and seizure inducing ad banners. Indeed, wading through the greatest misses of web programming is sometimes well [...]