Snoop Dogg & KiD CuDi - That Tree (tha 1 who Trevs remix feat. K-0TiC Couture)

Yup yup yup, entered another remix competition! With this track, I sped it up just a little to 108 BPM, a tempo that's getting a lot of attention these days what with Dave Nada's invention of Moombathon, which is Dutch house slowed down to reggaeton tempo. So my mix share some of those characteristics of deep bass and tropical rhythms, and lots of 808 tom drums!

And of course it's all rounded out by K-0TiC Couture's guest verse; if you haven't checked him out yet, you can follow him on twitter @MisterCouture. His latest mixtape is dropping May 11!

With this handy little widget seen below, you can listen to our remix as well as hear what it sounded before I got my hands on it, and you can even vote for it right there with that button! Voting is open until May 21st, but you may as well get it out of the way now, right?

Streetlab - Rat Racer (tha 1 who Trevs Remix feat. K-0TiC Couture)

YOOO I haven't posted here in tiiiiiime! I might start doin' stuff more often once I get this HD camera, but until then I'm gettin' more active on Twitter so follow me over there.

ANYWAY reason I'm here today is to tell whoever reads this to go over to Salacious Sound right now and vote for my remix in their latest competition! It features my homie K-0TiC Couture who you should definitely check out if you haven't already. I've got a bit to say about this track but I might wait until polls close to say it! and I'll also be posting it on SoundCloud and YouTube eventually but for now you hafta go over here to listen to it and vote!

PS lots of people seem to be having trouble voting; if you don't see any checkboxes then just try refreshing until you do!

Thanks everyone, and let's hope I start posting more often too!

Oh and that shortlink one more time (as if you didn't catch it) is http://su.pr/1bBNq3 !!!

Or, long link = http://salacioussound.com/2010/04/have-your-say-about-the-streetlab-remix-competition/

Rusko, on fire

I still remember the first poster I saw for a Rusko show in Toronto... I don't remember where it was, but I remember it was on a small black and white sticker and happened I think in April of 2008, and that even though I saw it everywhere for a while I still managed to miss that show.

I haven't passed up my past two opportunities though, and through my internship with Mad Decent I shot some video to share with y'all. The Mod Club show in October was definitely massive, and I have a three-camera shoot of it sitting on some DV tapes - I unfortunately do not have the time right now to edit or even capture that footage.

What I do have is a few choice clips from his appearance at The Social last March. Yes, the sound system blew out (something about faulty UK power converters, I heard) but he still rocked it - cueing tunes off his laptop while playing along with an MPD32 and live bass guitar! It's uncut/edited video, and amped up on the brightness/contrast to help compensate for the dark environment of The Social, but it's still a great shot of dude's performance style, so enjoy!

And if you're in Toronto this Saturday, get ready for this times a hundred (or technically times 14.682, venue capacity wise) when he comes to Sound Academy with Krazy Baldhead and a bunch of great local DJ/producers for the launch of Embrace's Digital Saturdays. More info on any one of the many, many facebook event pages here:

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=246092228877

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=225803845768

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=242053977466

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=262863427999

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=406634345006

LIL JON CLUB REMIX AND ORIGINAL TRACK

it's been a whiiiiile but i just realized i haven't posted any tracks i've made since ummm July, haha.

so first off, here's somethin i just started and finished, it's a [Baltimore] club [style] remix of Lil Jon [and LMFAO] - OUTTA YOUR MIND

HIGH QUALITY DOWNLOAD

and this is an older one, but i still liked it and made it in similar circumstances (between the hours of 1am and 6am after a night out)

HIGH QUALITY DOWNLOAD

La Roux - Bulletproof (SKPmix)

On that grind, just entered another remix competition. Yet again in SKP styles, but this time I actually got a more straightforward recording setup working, so the guitars were recorded in mere hours.

I did a few things to really make the bass kick on this one, so if you can listen to it with a subwoofer, please do! It really is sort of a problem, as I always have mine plugged in and end up mixing with it. Then I unplug it to see what the mix will sound like with just regular speakers, and it sounds like it's coming out of a cell phone :-/

Anyways, go and check it out, and vote for it! I guess you can check out the other mixes and the original as well, but I haven't even done that yet...

http://www.mxp4.com/remixcontest/laroux/bulletproof.html

(Click where it says vote on the remixes and then sort by most recent)

It's Bigger Than...

A little while ago I had a bit of a conversation with Brandon Soderberg over on his blog 41yo. The actual post and all the comments are gone now, but the main issue was this album cover:

Brandon (from Baltimore) took offense to DJ Sega (from Philly) using signifiers from Baltimore Club culture - Nino "Doo Dew" Brown is a triple-reference to the character Nino Brown from the movie New Jack City, the Baltimore club group Doo Dew Kidz, and the first national club hit "Doo Doo Brown."

I myself saw his post as having a similar attitude as a certain infamous piece by Tom Breihan. Sega is one of my favourite DJ's out right now, and I didn't think he was at all deserving of the charges Brandon was laying on him (I mean look, his shirt even says he's paid his dues).

Our discussion was heated, but I think it stopped just short of a flamewar; and by the end of it I think we both saw eachother's sides of the argument more clearly.

So that brings us up to now, and Brandon's got a great new article in Baltimore's City Paper that he apparently interviewed DJ Sega for. It's all about Baltimore club music's offshoots in other cities, but is very measured and evenhanded, unlike a lot of articles touching that area.

Barletta - Panther (SKP SalaciousSound Remix)

So whew this track came about through an interesting process.

I got wind that Salacious Sound was having a remix contest for this local Toronto DJ Barletta. I've heard a couple of Barletta's tracks, but not the one that was the subject of this competition (Panther). I mean I've seen it on blogs, but I just never listened to it for one reason or another.

So I thought it would be pretty fun to remix the song without even having any knowledge of the original to base it on. I took the tracks that were provided to me and did a bit of re-arranging and effecting before even listening to them individually.

This was/is gonna be another comeback track for my "band" SKP, of which the core members are myself and mybro Ian. Both of us ran in to some difficulties recording our parts...

First off, I don't have a real dedicated recording interface at home. What I can do is bootleg my USB DJ mixer into a 4-track recorder. So what I usually do is run a mic into that and then I can record into my computer. For whatever reason, that wasn't working this time. So after trying every other possible configuration of cables between guitar and PC, I settled on this familiar chain:

guitar > amp > microphone > record on to tape in boom box; play back tape in boom box > plugged in to computer

That's familiar because it's how we used to record stuff in my room when we first started SKP. Just goes to show that crazy Rube Goldberg analog/digital spaghetti monstrosities NEVER FAIL!

Anyway, I got some passable guitar tracks layed down (including a bottleneck-slide solo, Auto-Tuned; patent pending). Ian's vocals were/are another story though, since he currently resides off the grid (without home Internet) in North Carolina. I was gonna record his vocals over the phone while he listened to another song of a similar tempo, but it just didn't end up happening.

Here's the instrumental version, however, which is what I entered in the contest. Lol wish me luck?

Act Like You Know!

So I'm out on a flyer/poster mission last night and find myself on the corner of Richmond and Peter...

And I think I hear a little bit of this coming from someone's car...

So I was all like:

And turned to the guy in the car and said something like "that's a great song!" And he was all:

I said "DJ Blaqstarr! Tote It!" Him:

Then the song played out for a few more measures and I realized it was actually this:

But I was like "Still! Big song!" Quoth the gino:

So now I'm practically jumping up and down in the middle of Club District in the middle of the night, shouting at this guy about how I'm trying to compliment him on his music and he doesn't even know what it is he's listening to.

On another note, I also found myself in front of this place last night...

Apparently there was a huge extended hours dubstep party there that I hadn't heard a word of.

I just think it's crazy how a year-and-a-half ago, when I was first getting in to dubstep, it was almost impossible to find a place in Toronto to go to for it. Now you can just have a random party on a Tuesday night with absolutely no promotion and bring out a couple hundred random hipsters and yuppies who don't even know what DJs are playing. I asked!

Also last night, Cajmere was performing at Ultra:

As awesome as that song is though, I'm not too upset about missing that one because I'm pretty sure they won't let you in the door at Ultra unless yer over 25 and think that makes you better than everyone.

BANBURNAZ - MONDAY @ SUTRA TIKI BAR

K so BARNBURNAZ is like my party-throwing-gruppa with my dudes Stephen Hawk and Durag. A couple weeks ago we went around lookin' for places to DJ and Sutra Tiki Bar just got back to me, so we're doin' this! Let's hear it for a good turnout!

"superman that socialism, waterboard that terrorism"...

I'm asking these dudes nicely.  Here are a few possible plans of action for them to consider:

A) Become a parody group. Of course this would require them to first become actually good at rapping. I'd also suggest cutting the video length in half, because anything over three minutes these days just doesn't scream "comedy" to me.

B) Continue being serious. Yer still gonna hafta learn how to rap though.

C) Stop. Just...stop.

 

You can go ahead and be the only conservative at your college, I'm fine with that. But please please please please PLEASE could you not RAP about it? I would even theoretically be okay (or at least indifferent) with conservative hip-hop if it was done WELL! I mean, I ain't got a problem ridin' with my top down, listenin' to Jesus Muzik:

And on the other side, I'll admittedly get tired of preachy liberal hip-hop. But even though they also tend to sacrifice form for content, I can't think off-the-top-of-my-head of a leftist rapper that is just sooooo bad at rapping like The Young Cons.