Archive for April, 2007
2tall presents Dudley & Georgia ‘Beautiful Mindz’ LP
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The latest release from the Eclectic Breaks record label is a new long
player produced by 2tall (Jim Coles), featuring Dudley Perkins (aka
Declaime) and Georgia Anne Muldrow on vocal duties. This is a unique
UK/USA collaboration project that combines intelligent lyrics, free
thinking, poetic verse and skilled studio productions, to result in an
incredibly fresh, poignant and positive album.
The album’s title ‘Beautiful Mindz’ is a message to the listeners that
we are capable of much more than we think, and the project itself
reflects that it’s not difficult to put together a unique album of
music with people from other parts of the planet. From their initial
acquaintance to the albums completion, the whole experience was natural
and organic as all great partnerships are.
Originally known for his accolades in the DJ championship world, where
he took home the title of UK DMC Team Champions in 2003 with his crew
the Trusicians, 2tall has been making a name for himself as a producer
over the past few years. His release discography already includes two
albums; ‘Shifting Tides’ on Needlework Records and ‘Loose Ends For
Divination’ on Eclectic Breaks, plus his recent DJ battle tool
‘Peaceful Warrior’, along with several mix CDs, EP’s and 12” releases.
Dudley Perkins is best known for his releases on US label Stones Throw
Records, where he lends his unique voice to many of Madlib’s
productions. Highlights from his releases include the single ‘Flowers’
and album ‘Expressions (2012 A.U.)’, plus the album ‘Illmindmuzik’ as
Declaime on Good Vibe Recordings. Georgia Anne Muldrow is also
associated with Stones Throw, and is their only female signing. Noticed
early on by fellow LA hip hop trendsetters Sa Ra, as well as Detroit’s
Platinum Pied Pipers, the buzz created saw her sound reach the airwaves
of Worldwide with Gilles Peterson on the BBC, and to Peanut Butter
Wolf, who signed her to a two-album deal on Stones Throw, where she
recently released ‘Olesi: Fragments Of An Earth’. ‘Beautiful Mindz’ is
the first ever project from these three combined talents.
From the album’s epic bell chime intro, you know there is a serious
listening experience ahead. Dudley’s striking vocal commands attention
as he speaks about the state of the world, the “fonk”, and the upcoming
year 2012, which many ancient cultures have predicted as a time of
great changes in human evolution. Tracks such as ‘Atall’, ‘Poet Past
The Weak’ and ‘U R’ explore this subject matter further, with 2tall’s
beats providing the perfect carriage for the poignant lyrics. ‘U R’ in
particular offers guidance and positivity to a confused society, that
is often mislead by false idols and the media. There are no lectures or
preaching going on here though, the listener is simply invited to take
what they want from the message conveyed.
Georgia Anne Muldrow’s addictively original vocals take centre stage on
‘Aint That Strange’, whilst elsewhere, tracks such as ‘A Beautiful
Mind’, ‘Newniss’, and ‘Fonkwitme’ balance great songwriting, deep
lyrics and soulful musicality.
Wrapped together with intro’s skits and outro’s, ‘Beautiful Mindz’ is a
stunning album package that will be played again and again for years to
come.
Comments(1)DJ 2Tall Live at Skratch UK
Check out this crazy dope video presented by needlework. It only really touches on the talents of one of the most innovative turntablists of today - DJ 2Tall.
If you like this see the previous posts of Lamont on Ableton Live and Lamont funkin’ up 2Tall’s Peaceful Warrior Breaks.
DJ QBert - Swipes
This is another fader-less scratch that, as Q describes, kind of mimics a one click flare. To be honest I haven’t tried this scratch much in the form Q-Bert demonstrates it here, but will be fine tuning it for the next time I am on an alien scratch planet that don’t have mixers…
DJ Craze Needle Droppin’
Daaaaaaaaamn. These needle drops are tight!!! Who else but craaaaaaze. He throws in a few of his textbook flares and crabs along the way. But hell I still can get over those drops.. ‘no fader - ohh yeaah’.
Will post more on how to needle drop soon! Oh yeh and more Craze too.
DJ Craze Showcase
DJ Craze shows off his infamous turntablistic skills with a bit of his drum n bass influence thrown in. After watching this video it becomes quite apparent why he won three consecutive World DMC titles. This guy is off the hook! His scratches have so much style, his beat juggles…flawless. Respect.
turntablism.com.au update
New Features
You will notice a few new things around the site, mostly relating to the RSS feed. Feeds are a really cool and easy way to keep up to date with the latest posts on turntablism.com.au. If you are not sure what this is all about, learn more about RSS here. You can subscribe to turntablism.com.au RSS feed using many “readers” or “aggregators” like NewsGator, Google Reader or Yahoo.
You will also notice that you can now add our posts to digg and/or del.icio.us if you think they are worth sharing with everyone. Check out the respective sites to learn more about them.
Looking for contributors
I am currently looking for some people who are interested in helping to grow turntablism.com.au further than the mecca it already is. It can be as simple as alerting us of turntablism news or even writing articles to be posted on the site. Please contact us if you are interested in an way shape or form. We would love to hear from you!
Forums Closed
Unfortunately due to lack of activity/interest the turntablism.com.au forum has been temporarily closed. I don’t really have enough time to administer it and promote interest in it alongside the blog. Not to worry though as I WILL bring it back when the time is right. Sorry people…
Thats all the news I can think of for now… peace.
We live on a Hip Hop Planet…
I found this article from National Geographic when browsing Remix Theory the other day (check it out some time).
It makes for very interesting reading. The reason for posting this on a turntablism site may be obvious to some but not others so I thought I would justify it. Basically the backbone of Hip Hop is the DJ as we all may have heard. But Hip Hop is made up of a number of elements; MCing, DJing, Graffiti, B-Boying and Beat Boxing (not to forget the others named by KRS-ONE; street fashion, street language, street knowledge, and street entrepreneurism). So, basically, turntablism is an integral part of the hiphop culture and without hiphop there might not be turntablism as it is today. What follows is a quote from the first page of the article;
Text and Image source: National Geographic, Interactive Edition, April 2007
Whether you trace it to New York’s South Bronx or the villages of West Africa, hip-hop has become the voice of a generation demanding to be heard.
“This is my nightmare: My daughter comes home with a guy and says, “Dad, we’re getting married.” And he’s a rapper, with a mouthful of gold teeth, a do-rag on his head, muscles popping out his arms, and a thug attitude. And then the nightmare gets deeper, because before you know it, I’m hearing the pitter-patter of little feet, their offspring, cascading through my living room, cascading through my life, drowning me with the sound of my own hypocrisy, because when I was young, I was a knucklehead, too, hearing my own music, my own sounds. And so I curse the day I saw his face, which is a reflection of my own, and I rue the day I heard his name, because I realize to my horror that rap—music seemingly without melody, sensibility, instruments, verse, or harmony, music with no beginning, end, or middle, music that doesn’t even seem to be music—rules the world. It is no longer my world. It is his world. And I live in it. I live on a hip-hop planet.
High-stepping
I remember when I first heard rap. I was standing in the kitchen at a party in Harlem. It was 1980. A friend of mine named Bill had just gone on the blink. He slapped a guy, a total stranger, in the face right in front of me. I can’t remember why. Bill was a fellow student. He was short-circuiting. Problem was, the guy he slapped was a big guy, a dude wearing a do-rag who’d crashed the party with three friends, and, judging by the fury on their faces, there would be no Martin Luther King moments in our immediate future.
There were no white people in the room, though I confess I wished there had been, if only to hide the paleness of my own frightened face. We were black and Latino students about to graduate from Columbia University’s journalism school, having learned the whos, whats, wheres, whens, and whys of American reporting. But the real storytellers of the American experience came from the world of the guy that Bill had just slapped. They lived less than a mile (1.6 kilometers) from us in the South Bronx. They had no journalism degrees. No money. No credibility. What they did have, however, was talent.
Earlier that night, somebody tossed a record on the turntable, which sent my fellow students stumbling onto the dance floor, howling with delight, and made me, a jazz lover, cringe. It sounded like a broken record. It was a version of an old hit record called “Good Times,” the same four bars looped over and over. And on top of this loop, a kid spouted a rhyme about how he was the best disc jockey in the world. It was called “Rapper’s Delight.” I thought it was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard. More ridiculous than Bill slapping that stranger.
Bill survived that evening, but in many ways, I did not. For the next 26 years, I high-stepped past that music the way you step over a crack in the sidewalk. I heard it pounding out of cars and alleyways from Paris to Abidjan, yet I never listened. It came rumbling out of boomboxes from Johannesburg to Osaka, yet I pretended not to hear. I must have strolled past the corner of St. James Place and Fulton Street in my native Brooklyn where a fat kid named Christopher Wallace, aka Biggie Smalls, stood amusing his friends with rhyme, a hundred times, yet I barely noticed. I high-stepped away from that music for 26 years because it was everything I thought it was, and more than I ever dreamed it would be, but mostly, because it held everything I wanted to leave behind.
In doing so, I missed the most important cultural event in my lifetime.
Not since the advent of swing jazz in the 1930s has an American music exploded across the world with such overwhelming force. Not since the Beatles invaded America and Elvis packed up his blue suede shoes has a music crashed against the world with such outrage. This defiant culture of song, graffiti, and dance, collectively known as hip-hop, has ripped popular music from its moorings in every society it has permeated. In Brazil, rap rivals samba in popularity. In China, teens spray-paint graffiti on the Great Wall. In France it has been blamed, unfairly, for the worst civil unrest that country has seen in decades.
Its structure is unique, complex, and at times bewildering. Whatever music it eats becomes part of its vocabulary, and as the commercial world falls into place behind it to gobble up the powerful slop in its wake, it metamorphoses into the Next Big Thing. It is a music that defies definition, yet defines our collective societies in immeasurable ways. To many of my generation, despite all attempts to exploit it, belittle it, numb it, classify it, and analyze it, hip-hop remains an enigma, a clarion call, a cry of “I am” from the youth of the world. We’d be wise, I suppose, to start paying attention.”
Read the complete article at National Geographic, Interactive Edition. Definitely a great read for turntablists and hip-hop heads - check it.
(Posting theme music: DJ Goldenchyld - Ear Infections)
All the breaks you can poke a needle at
This site has got to be one of the most useful resources for all you crate diggers out there. The-Breaks AKA the rap sample FAQ is a leading website with a huge database of hip hop, rap, funk, soul, jazz and reggae tracks conveniently archived for easy search. Anyone visiting the site can search for their favourite artist or song and it will output all the sampled artists in that track. You can also search in reverse to see which hip hop artists sampled a certain track/artist. This is awesome if you want to find the original tracks to hip hop songs so you can put your own spin on it or rock the crowd with some funky old beats. I guess the hard part is then finding it on vinyl (unless you use Serato Scratch or Final Scratch…). Make sure you check out The-Breaks.com to be in the know!
