Modern & Im/material Things

Here’s a preview of a new track for my 2013 EP. The track is a work in progress. 

The song contains a sample of Marcel Khalife’s “Asfoor” from the At The Border Album. The sample is of the Oumeima El Khalil version of the song.

(via modernandmaterialthings)

Here’s a preview of a new track for my 2013 EP. The track is a work in progress.

The song contains a sample of Marcel Khalife’s “Asfoor” from the At The Border Album. The sample is of the Oumeima El Khalil version of the song. 

While I work toward a 2013 goal of releasing a mixed and mastered EP, here’s a sample of what’s in store for the next year. I’ll be releasing “The Stranger: Side B” in the next few weeks. 

The track is available for purchase here
 
Hat tip to Maury Postal for working with me on the cover art + logo. More to come in 2013 

A few pals of mine are in a band called Love and Radiation. L&R is something like Au Revior Simone meets Sleater-Kinney: lovely electro pop with alt girl guitar sensibilities. And to boot, they’re pretty cool ladies: Lakshmi is working on PhD in the Classics at UChicago and Adele runs her own civil rights law office. 

Over the weekend, I took a shot at remixing one of their tracks, “Disco Moon”. The remix is kind of minimalist and eastern(ish). Give it a listen if you’re inclined. And while you’re at it, give their music some love as well. 

Something like Burial meets James Blake with the R&B sensibilities of Disclosure (I think these brothers have the best name in electronic music)

This is one slick, well-produced track. There’s something kind of Old School Brian McKnight-y about this song. 

H/T to Britticism for the lead.

Last night, I read that Paris Hilton is launching her career as a professional DJ. Needless to say, I had a “Come to Jesus” moment with myself and decided if she can DJ, I can certainly learn to do it. So last night, I made my first ever DJ mix.  Because I’m a total nerd and project oriented, I am giving myself a ‘concept’ to work with to keep my DJ efforts disciplined and educational. This first mix isn’t perfect - I’m still learning to work on my transitions and seamless beat matching, etc. I should probably stick with one genre to keep things easy but where’s the fun in that? 

The concept?

Introducing “Summer Reading Playlists,”  in which I teach myself how to DJ by making mixes for the books of my summer reading. Mix One, “Regarding the Jams of Others” is based on the journals Susan Sontag kept in her teens and twenties. The book is Reborn and it’s pretty great. Sontag was a sharp, snarky, and brilliant budding lesbo in her youth. You get insight into her thoughts on motherhood and marriage. Weirder still is that the journal is edited by her son, who is mentioned quite a bit in the journals. 

Some of the artists in the mix include: Thunderheist, Body Language, Flying Lotus Burial, Nicolas Jaar, Portishead, Rhye, Delorean, Holy Ghost!, and Toro y Moi

And my favorite Missy Elliot song ever is on it too (“Let Me Fix My Weave”)

I’ll post a full track list in a few days. The mix can be downloaded directly from the my Soundcloud page in case you’re interested. Hopefully others will get some entertainment out of my “educational” summer project. For a first stab, it’s not all that bad. The second half is smoother than the first half but I gotta start somewhere, right? Someone, somewhere, might even think it’s kinda good. Either way, it’s an experiment in learning something new!

Playlist below (Screenshot)

Working draft of a new instrumental. 

LeXo, a Paris based electronic band, and I have spent the better part of 8 weeks ‘remixing’ and re-situating Slavoj Zizek’s Occupy Wall Street speech as an electronic music track. We are currently working on a more in depth write-up of our process working across countries, continents, DAWs as two strangers who have never met but connected in the realms of musical taste and political ideology. Expect a more formal post about that in the next week or so. In the meantime, enjoy the Zizek remix. Spread the word and share feedback. This is our attempt to reimagine how something like the Zizek speech can experienced and shared. 

#occupychristmas

P.S. I drew the cover art/portrait of Zizek in case you’re interested.

Click through for more information about LeXo’s work or my own.