Courtesy of our French friends at Hip Hop Core is a new free EP from Bleubird, featuring Noah23, with productions by Scott Da Ros, Raoul Sinier a.k.a. Ra, Kid Rolex, Bit Tuner, Playpad Circus and The Closing.

Download, enjoy and spread the word:
 http://www.hiphopcore.net/audio/hhcr.html

Tracklisting

01. Know The End (prod. Raoul Sinier)
02. Cyp Not Pyt (prod. Scott Da Ros)
03. Brute Force (prod. Bit Tuner)
04. Ripe Figs Remix (feat. Noah23) (prod. Playpad Circus)
05. G’s On TGV’s (prod. Kid Rolex)
06. Shotgun Birdy (prod. Scott Da Ros)
07. Perfucktion (prod. The Closing)

Live clip of “Cyp Not Pyt” from the EP:

Buck 65’s Bike For Three! is a new project with Belgian’s Joëlle Phuong Minh Lê (Greetings From Tuskan). The album, More Heart Than Brains, still doesn’t have a firm release date, but check out their facebook page for afew newly posted preview tracks, including “MC Space,” which is a reworking of a 1987 MC Shan track.

Ice-T and Black Silver are Black Ice. Urban Legends, billed as the first ever “Gangster Hip Hop” album, is now available on iTunes and features guest spots by Aceyalone, Too $hort, RBX, Marc Live, Tash of Tha Alkaholiks and many more.

Tracklisting

1. Black Ice (f/ Marc Live & Fedie DeMarco)
2. West Way (f/ Faxx, Fedie DeMarco & Aktion)
3. Chevy ‘64 (f/ Fedie DeMarco)
4. Out There (f/ Too $hort)
5. The Hunger (f/ Faxx, Fedie DeMarco & Mark Live)
6. Hood Technology
7. Silver’s Voicemail
8. Stop Talkin’ [RMX] (f/ Fedie DeMarco)
9. Bubble It Up (f/ Main Flow & Aceyalone)
10. Street Sweeper (f/ RBX)
11. I’m So Fly
12. Most Uv The Time [RMX] (f/ E-Rule & Griffen)

More info on Black Ice available here

A summertime mix from Germany’s Mnemotrauma; featuring tracks by Stetsasonic, Whodini, Pharcyde, Latyrx, Artifacts, Atmosphere, Gorillaz, Moloko, DJ Shadow, Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth and others…

Download it here.

A couple of new tracks from El-P were posted on his new Okayplayer blog  recently.

“Drivin’ Down The Block (El-P Remix)” Kidz In The Hall feat. El-P
“Mike Douglas” (from his new tour only 2xCD)

Catch EL-P on tour with Dizzee Rascal
May 8, 2008 – May 22, 2008

05/08/08 Washington, DC @ 9:30 Club
05/09/08 Philadelphia, PA @ The First Unitarian Church
05/10/08 New York, NY @ Webster Hall
05/11/08 Boston, MA @ The Middle East
05/12/08 Ottawa, ON @ New Capital Music Hall
05/14/08 Detroit, MI @ Crofoot Ballroom
05/15/08 Chicago, IL @ The Abbey
05/16/08 Minneapolis, MN @ The Triple Rock Club
05/19/08 Seattle, WA @ Neumos
05/20/08 Portland, OR @ Berbatis Pan
05/21/08 San Fransisco, CA 1015
05/22/08 Los Angeles, CA The El Rey

Video from James Pants’ debut album Welcome, dropping May 27th on Stones Throw Records. (read more)

I have been visiting Werner von Wallenrod’s Humble Little Hip Hop Site as far back as i can remember in internet years, back in the day it used to be the only place you could check out discographies for many indie rappers. Early last year Werner’s site graduated to blog format and definitely deserves a spot on anyone’s regular reading list. Check out this great post he made this weekend on rappers abandoning vinyl:

Check out Pace Won’s new joint… it’s on his myspace, Youtube, etc. Even if you threw away your Outsidaz fan club membership long before they split, or if you were only somewhat into them in the first place, I’m confident you’ll dig this. It’s almost “Nostalgia” part 2. Man, what an ode to hip-hop, with contemporary, fresh lyrics that are still witty and original over an addictive beat, a sampled hook and some nice scratching by his new producer/DJ Mr. Green… I can’t wait for the 12” to drop!

Except, when asked (via myspace, thanks soulcondor) about it, his response was:

“Vinyl?
Definately Mp3 and CD…
Won”

Now, this is not me having a go at Pace Won. …Well, maybe a little bit (I mean, come on!). This is about the indie hip-hop scene in general. Have a look at UGHH.com’s store page. Their 12” list has been blasted with a shrink-ray! It used to be this impressive list of brand new and pending indie 12”s, and now it’s tiny, dwarfed by the CD list.

If you missed this November ‘07 Wired article, you should really read it. Go ahead; I’ll wait here. Essentially, it’s a thorough, encouraging piece all about how, while the RIAA cries about downloads killing the music industry and CD sales dropping at record speeds [yes, that was a pun. Sorry. but they’re dropping very far and very fast is the point], record sales are, as Ian Connelly, client relations manager of independent distributor alliance IODA, put it, “way up. And not just the boutique, limited-edition colored vinyl that Jesu/Isis-style fans are hot for right now.”

Amazon.com even created a new vinyl only section, which they didn’t even have in the heyday of Sandbox and Hiphopsite in the late 90’s.

Now, Wired just made a new article where even the RIAA, who long tried to deny the vinyl resurgence, finally had to admit that “the American music industry sold 36.6 percent more Extended Play (EP) and Long Play (LP) records than it had in the previous year, increasing vinyl sales revenue by 46.2 percent. CD unit sales, on the other hand, declined 11.7 percent with revenue dropping 20.5 percent during the same period.” That’s a really drastic difference for a single year!

And where is hip-hop? Look at that Amazon vinyl section I linked. Today their featured pieces are R.E.M., Radiohead, Amy Winehouse, the Juno soundtrack, and Elvis frikkin’ Costello. There’s not even a single, crappy crossover psuedo-hip-hop release in the sidebar. Now go back and look at UGHH’s emaciated “New Vinyl Singles” selection again.

After years and years of us hip-hop fans buying and supporting vinyl when everyone else on the planet would look at us like we were escaped mental patients and ask, “you mean, the big round black things I used to play as a kid? Ha ha How novel!” After years of “SUPPORT VINYL” t-shirts and impassioned articles by DJs and collectors in Subculture, Rap Pages, Vinyl Exchange, URB, etc. etc…. Now my real estate agent and the hipster at the local supermarket are building massive 33 1/3 collections.

And when I reach out to the great old and true school artists, the leading figures in holding it down for the hip-hop underground, asking when their next 12” is dropping, I get, “LOL wut?”

Seriously, vinyl is up 46.2% just this year, while CD sales are still plummeting so fast record label CEOs are slitting their wrists in their high-rise offices,and NOW is the time you guys pick to abandon vinyl? I’m sorry, but my best, most thoughtful response to that is, “you suck!”

Now, I appreciate that a lot of indie artists are on low to no budgets… but you know who else is? Me! And if you want me… and by extension, I daresay, the rest of us remaining hip-hop fans who haven’t completely given up on the notion of supporting you artists and voting with our dollar, to just downloading all your albums as illegal mp3s for free. If you want us to show you some love, you’ve gotta get your acts together.

Records are back! But a time for celebration turns into a pitiful day when we see Madonna and Elvis Costello proving to be more hip-hop than Pace Won or, say, the entire roster of Koch Records.

– Written by wvwalenrod

Urbnet, 2008

Use a spoon to dig out the microchip under your right eye and hack a government database before they find out that the blip you correspond to has disappeared from their radar. Then rejoice that the Red Ants are back with what might be their last album (for a while at least). With news of Modulok and Vincent Price not getting along these days in our recent Red Ants interview, they may not be together when the mysterious legend Predaking gets out of jail to rejoin the group. Hopefully that’s not the case, because the new album, Omega Point, is strong and booming.

While it’s a rather short album being only nine tracks long, Vincent Price’s polished production delivers quality over quantity. It combines well-placed sci-fi and horror sounds to make every song cinematic. It would be easy to compare his production to a better-known producer famous for his futuristic slant (the founder of Definitive Jux), but Vincent Price has his own interpretation of drum mastery, with more up-beat tempos and marching breaks, reminding you of an army of, say red ants, about to swarm and attack an entire city block. As soon you reach the chorus of “Psychic Dictatorship”, your imagination gets abducted by climactic trumpets placed just right.

Modulok himself delivers his signature war torn and government conspiracy inspired battle raps with a conventional flow and inventive lines. He says things like “The road to nowhere … it leads to me.” and “I live an a basement. It’s a terrible mess. A cluttered mess of magnetic tape and metal boxes, haunted by an evil spirit, but caught it. Now it sits in a little jar all alone, giving dirty looks to the girls that I bring home.” He combines techno-babble with cleverness, but not in a perplexing way. He chooses to use a more anthem-like cadence than one too fast for the listener. Other than rapping about evil dictatorships, the grim fates of his old acquaintances, and his own psychosis, one of the coolest concepts he drops is on the song “Versus”, where different essences of feeling clash as one trumps the other. It starts out with ‘pleasure’ being the most important feeling in life, which is then destroyed by ‘pain’, which is then trumped by ‘love’, which is finally undone by ‘nothingness’.

Now there’s no doubt Modulok is putting his brain to use on the writing, his raps however still may not be for everyone. He comes across with an atypical accent a friend of mine described as distinctly Canadian. I would describe his voice as that of a chain-smoking dirty wu-ogre. His raspy and muddy vocal inflection may turn off people who prefer clear delivery and a more charismatic voice. I personally don’t mind it that much, just knowing something this raw and underground is coming out of Ontario Canada. Plus I appreciate the originality that it brings.

Fill in the Breaks, 2007

Do you ever get that feeling that reality is out to destroy you? That most of your whole life has been a waste of time? That society breeds us to adopt and display personalities not our own? That our hero’s are false, life is nothing more than boring, and that even pessimists are full of crap? Enter pessimist extraordinaire and poetic extremist Ecid, a Minnesotan hip hop artist who does it all; write, rap, produce, tour, co-found and run a label, release an average of 2 albums a year, and still find time to express relentless negativity about life in his art. Yup, I did say poetic extremist, because Ecid absolutely goes off. Lyrics take the forefront on this album, and he has a powerful voice and imagination to bring it there.

In “Re-Seeding Skyline”, he describes a Kevorkian-like doctor offering him euthanasia as a way to escape all the suffering he is going through. At first Ecid is enticed by the offer, but soon after becomes angered by the doctor’s pettiness in profiting off the death of others, and decides he’d rather live with the sorrow and propaganda than give a single cent to the powers bent on driving him to destruction. Besides weaving imaginative stories, count on him to speckle fanatical quotes in most of his songs. “If hip hop was really dead, there’d be nobody complaining about it, brick walls and bus stops would be completely spotless, shitty demo tapes would be harder to find than Bin Laden and the record labels would let all the MC’s keep the profits.” — Crooke Cologne. “I used to have a lot of friends. But real friends require maintenance. Now I just have a lot of ‘Yes Men’ looking to steal my so-called ‘Greatness’. I’m not famous, I’m a sell-out in the making.” — The Art Of Losing It. When it comes to delivery, Ecid has no well-defined cadence structure and sometimes squishes his words together just to get his lengthy messages across. While such feats are capable by some of hip-hop’s best MC’s, Ecid tends to have a bit of a lazy pronunciation, where he doesn’t quite articulate rushed consonance. That means you’ll find yourself rewinding a song occasionally just to decipher what he just said. The beats are up-tempo, dark, dusty, and psychological. Although not overly polished, they blend together to create a complete and intense cynic experience.

I would recommend any body check out a few songs of his at least. He has vocal strength, ingenious imagination, good lyrics, and made an album that feels complete from front to back. While he does take brooding to a new level, and doesn’t quite come correct on word-for-word delivery, Economy Size goDD Costume’ is a masterful work of hip-hop art in general.

Video for the first single from Time Machine’s upcoming album Life is Expensive, dropping May 20th on Glow-In-The-Dark Records. (read more)