micapam | j.l.b

Nasty Tek Soundsystem, whose Dancehall Reggae Bounce parties over the last couple of years have given Sydney’s reggae and dancehall heads somewhere to get their groove on, are putting on a free one-off night called Reggae Old Gold, at Jimmy Sing’s Record Stand, 302 Cleveland St, Surry Hills, this Saturday.

Nasty Tek, Gold Finder Sound and Jimmy Sing are playing (from the promo email): “strictly big reggae tunes from earlier eras, 80s classics, Studio One, singers tunes and old gold tunes galore!” Should be some tasty cuts - I haven’t heard the other guys play but Nasty Tek have mad tunage from way back when. Click the little flier on the right to see it fullsize.

This is the funniest stipulation of a music policy I have ever read .. from my mate whose birthday party I’m playing a few tunes at:

If u tried to play anything but hip hop I would slice your hands off with a machete and feed them to your next of kin

Well maybe nothing like that but hey u R PLAYING HIP HOP ! AND NOT ANY KIND OF HIP HOP BUT UK HIP HOP !

Saw Alice Russell at the Forum on Friday night. Blinding. I have to get a copy of the new album .. standout track for me was ‘What We Want’ - a two-step-ish tune off My Favourite Letters - the way the live band interpreted the electronically produced original was fresh and inspiring. But it was her incredible voice that made this show. Gush, gush. It’s all glory to my home town (she’s a Brighton girl) .. represent!

Just a quick roundup of the more interesting bits I’ve been reading around the web ..

YardFlex.com has a brief interview with Sizzla. The first paragraph seems, by referring to his early output (by which standards, his more recent efforts have abandoned both quality and integrity for the sake of prolific output and commercial success) to hint obliquely at his fall from grace. But either I am reading too much into it or they are too squeamish to criticise someone whose best material is so good he is still a living legend. Grow some balls - whoever you are, you’re only as good as your last album.

There’s some other tidbits of news on that site though, such as the end of the Vybz Kartel / Mavado feud, in the interests of keeping peace between more rabid elements of their fanbase. Speaking of beef, Cocaine Blunts reports that KRS-1 and Poet have cut a collaboration, ending another hiphop feud - the tune is pretty good (there’s a sample alongside the article), with some nice lyrics from both.

Hiphop production blog Can I Bring My Gat is carrying an interview with El-P. His comments on the fact that many of his fans are not hiphop heads are interesting:

I think that you could say the same thing about pop music, couldn’t you? Like pop-hip-hop, top 40 hip hop. People who have no connection to hip-hop other than the fact that they are listening to top 40? People who listen to whatever pop music is, and therefore hip-hop is pop music, but they are not in love with hip-hop. I think that there are people that are attracted to the music that myself and some of my peers do that may not know a lot about hip-hop, but we’ve become a gateway drug ya know? And I’m proud to be that. I would love to be that drug, that introductory drug into the world that I love so much and know so much about. you gotta get there somehow I suppose, right?

Gateway drug - I like that. I’m not sure I agree but it’s a good analogy.

1Xtra’s MistaJam reports that Just Blaze is doing a live production / recording session with Klashnekoff, Skepta and JME, today in front of an invited audience, while designer Brent Rollins simultaneously designs the sleeve artwork.

If you haven’t seen Dizzee’s new video for Sirens, check it out on YouTube (link from Prancehall).

CreateDigitalMusic has a little article on using the Wii remote as a virtual theramin, among other uses … weird.

Scratch Live is a beautiful thang (to misquote Spike Lee). Apart from the convenience of carrying around thousands of tunes in a laptop rather than lugging record boxes (and having doubles of every tune, and being able to treat any digital recording as if it were vinyl), you are also able to sort by BPM and quickly find tracks on a similar tempo - which gives rise to some combinations you might not otherwise think of.

This does mean, however, that you have to go through the laborious task of checking and saving the BPM of each of your tracks. There are some programs out there that claim to be able to do this automatically and in bulk, but don’t trust em. Maybe it works for house or techno, but if you’re playing proper music with a breakbeat or a broken beat or a one drop or a two step - or anything but the dumb rigid beat known popularly known as “4/4″ (technically, pretty much everything mixable is 4/4, even the most hectic out-there drumfunk, but that’s beside the point) - you’re stuffed.

So you have to do it the hard way, tapping out the beat while you listen to the tune on some kind of BPM counter. I used to use this one, but it’s buggy as, and I don’t think it works on Intel. I just found out about ltjBPM (nothing to do with Bukem, as far as I can tell). It works much better, you use the keyboard instead of the mouse, and it has a chimpanzee as the icon. What more could you want. Well done that monkey.

The night after Beat Em Up is the last DnBBQ of the season … wicked lineup including Rastawookie (soon to launch their album) and K-Oscillate.

On the inauspicious date of Friday 13th April, “Beat Em Up” (a curiously named dnb/breaks weekly) will be graced by the talents of the following:

Basslines Crew (FBi)
Gotham (Hipstep Massive) + DTech MC (Kobra Kai)
Vice Versa (Good Looking)
Polaris (Galaxy of Drums) + SPEx MC (The Hook)
… and us: Inna Riddim Soundsystem

It’s at Taylor’s on Central (84-86 Mary St, Surry Hills). Kicks off around 11pm and goes till late.