#The Beat Konducta

[gregyro]

[beatsforbrothels]

Madlib - Do You Know? (Transition)

[radiophd]

beat konducta -- enter... hot curry

[votava-records]

Yasiin Bey fka Mos Def - World Premiere (Prod. Madlib)

From Madlib: Beat Konducta Vol. 5-6: Dil Cosby & Dil Withers Suite by Madlib

[anstee]

https://www.lifeonsundays.com/post/713353833999450112/rappcats-madlib-beat-konducta-vol-0-earth

[garden-ghoul]

Okay here finally is the music meme @blotthis tagged me in. I don't know what Spotify likes are so I tried to approximate them by listening to a bunch of Bandcamp albums someone on cohost recced a while ago. I chose my favorite song from each album, in order I have them bookmarked. It's been a fun exercise in reshaping my mind to a diverse set of aesthetic paradigms so I can try to understand what each musician sees in their own music. That said. Some of these I'd be reccing anyway.

Points At Head from This Year I Lose My Mind by 2 Mello. Music that makes me wish I had more genre vocabulary. Energetic, funky, hiphoppy I guess?? Jazzy. Has kind of a C2C/Destroid vibe. We're grooving. I like this album.

Oh My God from Shabrang by Sevdaliza. Dark, breathy, synthy. Sevdaliza does fun stuff with autotune and other vocal mods as well as having a lot of great beats. Honestly I'd love to hear more of her unmodified voice in this track because she's a great vocalist. This is a good album if you want to get kind of chill and introspective and weird.

Owens from Little Robert Hutton by Curly Castro. One of the slower starts on a very maximalist album. Curly Castro is doing some fantastic collage here; I like how he plays with samples, clearly pulling from classic DJing on vinyl. I don't know enough about modern rap to compare the vocals to anything but Doomtree, RIP.

Withering Fire from Still as the Night, Cold as the Wind by Vital Spirit. Okay, I will confess I'm not enough of a metalhead to be able to distinguish any of these songs from each other. But as far as I can tell it's a good example of the genre, and if you need some big dramatic texturey noises this album is here for you.

Rock from Ez Minzoku by Foodman. I was having a hard time picking a song from this album, because a lot of it kind of sounds like someone mashing a midifighter loaded with the Earthbound soundfont. The album is hit or miss for me but as soon as I heard Rock I had to put it on this list. An exuberant electric guitar chiptune that's just weird enough for me.

The Mystery (Dilla's Still Here) from Beat Konducta Vol. 5-6 by Madlib. This album only has two songs you can listen to without buying it but on hearing this one I immediately started digging for his first album so I could listen to more of his music. More fun with samples; this is what I might call chillhop if I weren't so aware how boring most chillhop is. From Wikipedia's page on him, no-one's really sure how to categorize him because he's fusing so many genres.

The Great Mist Within from The Great Mist Within by Auriferous Flame. See I said I wasn't enough of a metalhead for Vital Spirit but actually I am a metalhead now. I really like Auriferous Flame's chords and I am gaining appreciation for the textural nature of black metal. I didn't make it all the way through any of these songs but I would if I were just leaving the album playing while I draw.

Son of Man from Rice Field Silently Riping in the Night by Reiko Kudo. I feel like this is one of the best tracks to show off how Kudo thinks about sound, with the different instruments kind of detuned from each other. This whole album is sort of like a distorted reflection of "normal music." Despite occasional loud honking noises it's pretty chill. I enjoyed the description of the recording process at the bottom of the page.

Dance Now from The Forever Story by JID. If you listen to one hiphop album this year, it should be this one. Every single track is a flawless gem with no missing pieces and nothing unnecessary, so the specific song I picked is just the first one I really started jamming out to. Very slick but not overproduced, fantastic beats, fantastic rhymes, wonderful vocals, great instrumentation. I can't coherently talk about the vibe of this album, just listen to it.

Cruise Control from 2000 by Joey Badass. As you may have noticed, I tend to be into chill wavey hiphop, which is why I chose this song off 2000. I really like the outro, it has a classic jazz piano thing going on. This is a hard album to review because I think I'd be more into it if I hadn't just listened to THE PERFECT ALBUM. Ah well. It's good.

[friend-crow]

I was very surprised to discover Madlib at #4 on my spotify wrapped, but then I remembered that I was listening to all of the Beat Konducta albums while I was in the spreadsheet mines for two months last spring, because lyrics were too distracting.

[the-final-straw-blog]

Defend Kevin "Rashid" Johnson + Anarchist News Segments

This week, you'll hear four segments to the show. To hear the latest Sean Swain segment, you can find it at archive.org..

Medical Neglect at VDOC

First up, you'll hear updates on the situation of Kevin “Rashid” Johnson of the Revolutionary Intercommunal Black Panther Party by Shupavu wa Kirima, General Secretary of that formation and partner of Rashid. Rashid has been showing signs of prostate cancer for over a year and his medical visits and care have been clearly delayed and avoided by Virginia Department of Corrections staff and administration. There is a call for phone zaps on the VDOC, Warden McCoy & the rest of Sussex 1 prison to demand that Rashid get the treatment that he needs to stay alive. Updates can be found on the RIBPP instagram & twitter accounts, on Shupavu’s personal social media and RashidMod alongside his writings. You can contact the RIBPP about this effort via defendrashid@protonmail.com . Check the show notes for more links. [ 00:02:26 - 00:21:56 ]

Defend Rashid Statement from RIBPP

Shortened link to main document: bit.ly/DefendKRJ

Shortened link to Google Folder: bit.ly/krjdc

Defend Rashid toolkit: bit.ly/DefendRashidToolkit

Rashid’s website: rashidmod.com

Fundraiser for Legal Defense: https://fundrazr.com/025tu2

Our 2018 chat with Rashid

Bad News Segments

Then, we’ll be featuring a few segments from recent months episodes of Bad News from the A-Radio Network:

You’ll hear an interview from the November 2022 episode by Frequenz-A with Lölja Nordic a leftist anarchist from the Feminist Anti-War Resistance from St. Petersburg, Russia, to speak about the international, feminist, anti-war movement against the Russian war in Ukraine. You can find that telegram channel at t.me/femagainstwar in Russian. [ 00:22:42 - 00:35:44 ]

We share an interview by A-Radio Berlin from October with ABC Belarus on the infotour they were conducting at the time. [ 00:36:08 - 00:49:06 ]

Finally, back to Frequenz-A with someone about the squat opened this fall in Slovenia known as PLAC, the acronym meaning square and standing for Ljubljana Participatory Autonomous Zone [ 00:49:24 - 01:02:40 ]

. ... . ..

Featured Tracks:

Unknown To The I by Drab Majesty from Completely Careless (2012 - 2015)

Signals by Apollo Brown from Trophies Instrumentals

Brazil by Beat Konducta from Beat Konducta Around The World

Check out this episode!

[mywifeleftme]

233: Freddie Gibbs & Madlib // Piñata

Piñata Freddie Gibbs & Madlib 2014, Madlib Invazion

As of 2023, Freddie Gibbs & Madlib’s Piñata sits at #18 on RateYourMusic.com’s user-generated all-time hip-hop chart, and #113 for all albums. RYM, for the unfamiliar, is sort of an IMDb for music, and if its rankings aren’t as aggressively gauche as IMDb’s (I just looked at their top 250 films for the first time in years and guffawed), they’re still pretty slanted towards the tastes of the mostly white collegiate dudes and divorce dads who feel compelled to, well, rate their music. Though I wouldn’t accuse either Gibbs or ‘lib of trying to curry the white vote or anything, Piñata is perfectly calibrated to pleasure the sort of guy whose hip-hop canon is rooted in AllMusic Picks—and speaking as one of them, allow me to say it’s pretty good for that! But at the same time, there is a consistency to both beat and rhyme that makes it kind of like elite-tier background music, stuff that sounds great when it’s on that I nonetheless have difficulty paying deep attention to.

Madlib, like his friend Dilla, has always been sort of the avant-garde within the traditional. No matter how out there he gets, the beats he makes are still very clearly rooted in ‘90s boom-bap, and the tracks that Gibbs selected for Piñata are among the most conventional ‘lib’s ever done. When you throw the record on, you’re hit with pure soul-sampling nostalgia from the moment the needle drops, and there isn’t really a beat where the energy slacks or loses the groove. The mostly hook-free tracks do that classically Madlib thing (a la his Beat Konducta tapes and Madvillainy) of blending one into the next like you’re listening to a DJ set. As a result, you might have trouble remembering which songs stood out unless they’ve got a particularly memorable guest appearance or sample (a la “Higher” and “Harold’s”).

I have it on good authority that Freddie Gibbs says a lot of very cool shit on this record, but if you searched me for quotes, you’d just find three lighters, a dry pen, two metro cards and some illegible receipts. At no point does he sound like anything less than a stud on the mic, and his flow is faultless. But he has a way of munching his way through his bars with such metronomic efficiency my attention is lulled. Even on the more off-kilter beats like “Bomb,” he just calmly assesses the challenge ahead, nods to himself, and then attacks it with his usual casual, high PER athleticism. I was surprised to find myself perking up when a jabroni like Domo Genesis showed up, but honestly the occasional cameos from rappers both great (Raekwon and Danny Brown) and corny (Mac Miller and Ab-Soul, who uncharacteristically kills it on “Lakers”) inject life where Freddie’s shark-eyed flow just stacks bodies.

This review sounds a lot more negative than I really feel about this record (I bought it! I don’t plan on selling it!), but in the face of the intensity of praise this one has garnered in some quarters, I can’t help but compare it to the records that really seeded my love for rap. Despite its masterly technique, this lacks the flair and personality I’d need to put it on that classic level. (Freddie and Madlib are absolutely crushed, I’m sure.)

233/365

[bigpapicolon]

[eye-know]

😌

[gregyro]

[beatsforbrothels]

Madlib - The Electric Zone (Long Version)