Remember the time when Bahamadia made a track on her phone using nothing but an app and her rhymes? No? Get familiar. Times have moved on from the exclusivity of a hardware drum machine as a form of hip hop technology. There are a bunch of apps on the market now, some of which we …
Sweden’s JHAS threw some “unfinished” beats together into a gritty 8-track EP called Random Selection. Having a bunch of beats on your computer just sitting there with no real purpose is something I can identify with. They could have been made for a scrapped project or just for the sake of it. JHAS from Stockholm …
Clearly we either had too much good music to partake in June 2012 because we somehow managed to miss this positively awesome album from Philly’s own Glen Booth aka Knxwledge. The Auracle reporting for euphoric overload. You never really know just how good a particular artist is until you start going through their back catalogue …
The 19-year-old Pennsylvania-based human hip-hop experiment Evan Souza AKA DarkoTheSuper invites you on follow him on a bold and warped quest through aural space with Thank You Jim Cunningham. ‘Challenge accepted,’ says our reviewer (The Auracle). There’s something about this dude DarkoTheSuper that is so strange and flipped out, yet at the same time, it’s …
Kinetic_beats is our One To Watch today. Hailing from the Hip-Hop Mecca that is Detroit this soulful MPC lover provides us some audio delights… Live and direct from motor city Kinetic_beats sure maintains those soulful vibes with well chosen samples and classic grooves with his own signature style. Found Kinetic_beats while I was going through …
ESTA.’s tremendous Sade flip, Skyscrape($ade), has been on heavy rotation for a while and it’ll have you bugging out too. For those who don’t know, The Auracle and I are cousins and we share a mutual love and admiration for the one they call Sade Adu and it was my cousin who put me onto …
DJ Jay Smooth made a special funk mix for Prince’s birthday this year and we’re JUST getting round to hearing it.
Who’s William Hall? Only one of many Michael Jackson impersonators. and our Throwback Thursday shows part of his performance back in the 80s on a Hispanophonic TV show. During his life and after death, Michael Jackson has had more impersonators than Rick Ross has had hot wings. The job meant appearance changes, and for some …
9th Wonder catches us off guard with a mammoth 73-track beat tape, Bladey Mae, named after his grandma. There was me getting ready to listen to some of the latest releases from this week (The Foreign Exchange, Tanya Morgan, Drake) and out of the blue, 9th Wonder dropped a 73-track beat tape (yep, seventy-three) named …
We hope you liked our last instalment of Leftover Links because we have more hip hop articles for your perusal.
A kind soul has uploaded the entire transmission of FlyLo FM to YouTube.
It’s been 22 years to the day that A Tribe Called Quest released The Low End Theory. I’m gonna tell you a secret. When songs overwhelm me with their greatness, I get goosebumps and I well up. Sometimes it’s due to a sentimental association; happier times when I didn’t have a care in the world. …
It would have been John Coltrane’s 87th birthday yesterday so for that, we’re looking at five samples of the late jazz master’s work. They say the good die young and in John Coltrane’s case, that might well be accurate. The jazz saxophonist, born in North Carolina, passed away at the relatively young age of 40 …
Guest writer Ashton James Brown (aka Ashtronomic) reviews Jordan James’ Love Waves EP. South London based R&B crooner Jordan James has been making some noise for a while, releasing his début the Cheeky Bastard EP in the spring of 2012. Where as that project was much more of a Hip-Hop focused affair tinged with R&B …
We take a look at five albums made using the MPC1000. I was fortunate enough to come into a large tax rebate a couple of years back and decided it was time to progress my production into a more hardware based set up. Until that point, I was strictly a LPD8/LPK25 guy with Logic, CDs …
He supports Arsenal and his beats are as big as the Emirates Stadium itself. Meet North London’s own Jake Whyte aka J WHY. In a city of about 8 or 9 million inhabitants and rising, you’d think that the odds of finding someone with the artistic abilities to get your neck snapping six ways to …
Vancouver, Washington’s Gloam marks a return from duty with new track Alloyed Shuffle. Been a hot minute since I last heard anything from Gloam (he works for the US Army hence the sporadic musical output) so it’s good to see he hasn’t lost anything in the way of quality. Alloyed Shuffle is one of three …
Grammy award-winning super producer 9th Wonder steps out of the studio and into the classroom with James Peterson and Professor Mark Anthony Neal to talk about one of the greatest hip-hop albums of all time, the impact it made, and much more in this week’s edition of Saturday Matinée. If you’re talking about hip-hop these …
Jonwayne recently released a new mixtape and The Auracle enjoyed it so much, he almost forgot to submit the review we asked him to write. Let’s not beat around the bush here, folks: Jonwayne’s latest tape is all killer, no filler. I’ve seen his name bandied about on Twitter and whatnot but never thought to …
Detroit’s Theo Parrish talks about his love of crate digging in Electronic Beats’ Slices DVD magazine. This is actually from a year ago but it’s new to us so we’ll treat it as such. Electronic Beats is a quarterly-published magazine dedicated to electronic music and as part of their Slices DVD feature, they followed Theo …