The 4th Annual Rap Round Robin featuring AK SLAUGHTER from Small Snake Productions on Vimeo.

The 4th Annual Rap Round Robin featuring Height with Friends from Sarah Milinski on Vimeo.

The 4th Annual Rap Round Robin featuring PT BURNEM from Jared Paolini on Vimeo.

And an piece about it on WYPR’s Maryland Morning

And don’t forget the show with Height With Friends & PT Burnem this Saturday at Chapalas.

I realize that I’ve never really said anything about PT Burnem here before which is absurd.  He’s an amazing producer/ rapper who destroys it with an intense live show.  I was also lucky enough to help him record and mix his latest album which you can get here.

The Rap Round Robin is also coming up on the 7th and I definitely should have some promo stuff for it soon.

In other news, I’ve been steadily working on a new release. It’s going to be called “Theories To Believe In For People Who Trust”. I’m not sure if it’s going to be an EP or an album yet but I’m getting close to finding out.  A few nights ago Sam Herring from the always awesome Future Islands came by to lay a hook down for a song on it.  Damn he can sing, he’s got mega pipes, loud as fuck, had to turn the gain waaay down. The song is gonna be aweseome. He’s a mega hip-hop junky and perhaps the first person I met that really knows about the Pink Dots. We also worked on some of his Hip-Hop songs with production by yours truly. He’s planning on dropping his debut rap album soon, so get ready!

HEIGHT WITH FRIENDS: JULY 16th: ANNEX 3E: YE$ from Sarah Milinski on Vimeo.

And the annul Rap Round Robin is happening this year @ Floristree on August 7th.  I’ll have more info soon.

See you on the 5th

I just added What’s Left to my Bandcamp page.  Listening to it again I’m amped, it truely is a unique record – Drum & Bass, Jungle, Hip-Hop, Rapping, Politics plus a whole bunch of things going on some that I don’t even remember.  What’s Left Breaks the Silence is just the Banger.  The way Son Of Nun rhymes on Free really reminds me of going to raves and hearing the UK MCs do their thing, not too much rhyming just dropping in here and there to spice things up (I got chills listening to it). The rage/ metal on Aggravated Assault.  The energy on The Brakes are gone is killer…  My technology rap on Steve’s Job, “E-D-I-T 12-bit fuzzy, using Peak 2 via SCSI.” It’s awesome that the whole joint is continuous like a mixtape too… yup, the album still stands up almost 8 years later.

I’m including 4 bonus tracks not available with the original release.  It feels good to finally release these remixes and get all the What’s Left Material out.  3 are remixes and one is another track that Son Of Nun and I did together.  Here is the story on the remixes.  When I signed my deal for the album the label was going to do a release with 3 songs of mine, 3 of Meat Beat Manifesto, and 3 of 2nd Gen.  The release was to be in a series of theirs called Personal Settings and this was for Volume 3.  They never released it but these are the 3 tracks that I did for it.  I remember scrambling my brain cause I literally had a few days to get them done.  I remember doing Steve’s Job (Digital B-Boy Mix) and wondering if it sounded too much like Baltimore Club because of the repetitive vocals.  Listening to them now I think that they turned out well and do still stand up as remixes / supplementary material for the album.  Necessary, I’m still really proud of and S.O.N.’s lyrics are great.  In hindsight I realize that I really didn’t have any clue as to the depth of what he was talking about.  I got the general idea but the specifics went way over my head, listening to them now I hear how on point his lyrics really were.  Being in our early 20′s at the time, he really knew what the fuck was up.  Seriously, read the lyrics at the end of Aggravated Assault, they are all still relevant today.  There’s a part of me that feels that Necessary was perhaps our best work or at least the beginnng of a new direction to go.  We could have gotten a lot better and developed into something really special, but alas we were young and shit happens… I digress… peace to Son Of Nun.  I’m not going to talk about Quatermass and Fred Wahleer (don’t trust him) being a lying bastard that never fulfilled any of his contractual obligations (or anybody signed to his label it seems) or made any attempt to come to any form of reconciliation with me after numerous x multiple attempts on my part because there would be no point.  I still am grateful for the album being released and Gauthier Keyaerts (Mash’ta/ The Aktivist) is and will always be the fuckin man and a true friend of mine.   As a side note, I sent the song Necessary to Warp records not expecting anything but one day I did get an email out of the blue from them saying that they really liked that song and they weren’t gonna sign me or anything but they just wanted to let me know that they liked that one song.

I didn’t think I was gonna write all of this and I could write 2 more pages cause I never really talked about all the things that went down with this record.  I put a lot of work into it and still have a lot of feeling about it.  But I’ll let the music do the talking.  Peep it, hear it, listen…

Not sure what’s going on here but I thought it would be a good note to end on:

More coming up