Well, my computer just crashed after I had this pretty nice post about Miho Hatori written up. This is because we have an IT guy here at “the day-job” who refuses to update a computer when it’s not absolutely necessary (and only works from home), which means any time I accidentally load a page that has QuickTime, I can expect my computer to crash and erase a couple pages about the mid-90s hip-hop hipster scene (back before “hipster” was such a dirty word).

I’ll try to remember what I’d said now, but I’m sure enough of you know the “FUCKING COMPUTER JUST ERASED WHAT I WAS WRITING” feeling, and how much it bums you out trying to retype what you just wrote. But it goes like this:

You remember Miho Hatori, right? Half of the original duo of Cibo Matto? I suppose anyone who hit up the hipster clubs back in the 90s (or, uh, snuck in because they’re a few years younger than the other PCS writers) has to have shaken ass to “Birthday Cake” at some point. Maybe the new blood out there remembers the song from the Jet Set Radio Future soundtrack on Xbox (a horribly mixed version, I have to say, no matter how much I loved the song). Or know her from her work with Gorillaz (you know, the vocals that sound like a small Asian girl — I think “Noodle” was her name?). Maybe others remember her work with the Beastie Boys, or Smokey Hormel, Russell Simins (the former drummer of John Spencer Blue Explosion and solo artist, not the rap-mogul’s name misspelled), Sean Lennon, Blackalicious, Handsome Boy Modeling School, Japanese hip-hop group Kimidori, or any of the many other projects she’s worked on.

Her solo album, Ecdysis, dropped in Japan in 2005, and despite her being a New Yorker for well over a decade now, the North American and European release was pushed back to ‘06. And here it is in 2007, where it sets a good tone for someone who’s been fighting a cold for about a week now, and just had his computer erase his entire post. It’s pretty relaxing like that. I’ve noticed a lot of those old Grand Royal people (Jill Cuniff, I’m looking your way) have been getting tropical lately. I don’t mind it. Lord knows, I’m from Miami and I love me some Brazilian tunes, even when they’re actually by New Yorkers working with the inspiration.

Anyway, sick days mean a lot of YouTube for me, and I found this nice live video of Miho and friends performing “A Song For Kids” off of Ecdysis for Indie 103.1 FM (a station I’ve never listened to, but they’ve got some nice videos up on YouTube — +2 points for Pigeon John and Money Mark). It’s a pretty version of the song, and I’ve always admitted I have a real soft-spot for pretty music. Love those vocals. One of the few times you hear her sing entirely in Japanese, and it really serves the song well. And as my good friend minusbaby says, “She dances nice.”

And since I’d never give you a live version or a cover if I didn’t have the original on hand (that’s a lie, I did that a few weeks ago with the Isabelle Antena song), here’s the album version of “A Song For Kids”. Different style from the rather straight-forward live version, definitely more of the Miho sound you’d come to expect.

MihoHatori-ASongForKids.mp3
(download Miho Hatori’s “A Song For Kids”)

But let’s keep this rolling. Recently, Japanese artist/animator Ishiura Masaru put together a video for the first single off Ecdysis, “Barracuda”, and the internets have gotten a hold of this as well.

There’s a higher-res QuickTime version up (and available to download) at www.mihohatori.com, if you like the video and have the kind of computer that won’t crash and erase everything you’re writing if you try to view it.

And to close this out, yes, we will take it back to the classic that started it off (for me, anyway)… a live version of “Birthday Cake”. As my roommate said last night when he saw it, “Holy shit that’s punk rock!”

Yes, Bosko. Yes it is.

So punk rock.

Weather.com is full of shit. Yesterday it was supposed to be humid and muggy, but turned out to be cold and wet, leaving me miles from my apartment throughout the day, freezing my ass off in a cold rain with a broken umbrella and a light t-shirt. Today it’s supposed to be raining, but it’s a gorgeous, sunny day, bordering on 80 degrees.

I’m not saying this because I care all that much about the weather, or talking about the weather, for that matter. I’m saying this because I have to plan the music I’m listening to throughout the day by the weather. Not solely the weather, but it’s a factor. It’s tough to listen to 70s Cuban drum circles in the pouring rain on a Monday in New York City, and it would feel just as out of place to put on some Portishead or something now that it’s balmy and sunny out.

So in a rush to find the right tunes to listen to on the train to work this morning, I loaded up Frank of the Voodoo Funk blog’s latest mix of African rarities, “Life Is A Game”, because funk and afrobeat is perfect for a bright summer day. Man, what insane sets these are. For those who don’t actively read the B&C and missed Morris’s nod to the site, Voodoo Funk a blog run by Frank, a DJ from Berlin who specializes in funk 45s (and founder of the Soul Explosion party), who gave up the spot-rockin’ DJ’s life to move to Africa and dig for rare records. He writes about his experiences traveling through Africa, and post mixes of rare tracks for the rest of us to catch up on. His mixes are fantastic and his stories are interesting. I really liked the piece about Mr. Mafa’s record store: “Record stores or “recording studios” in Africa usually aren’t places where records are sold but where you can order custom made mix tapes put together from the owner’s record collection.”

From Frank’s Voodoo Funk bio:

I used to run the Soul Explosion. A party in Berlin for those who enjoy raw hard and rare Funk 45s. Before that I hosted the infamous sleazefest Vampyros Lesbos in NYC but that would be another story… The Soul Explosion started in 2000. In the summer of 2005 I turned the night over to my friend Mark and left Europe to dig up funk records even more obscure and elusive than US Funk 45s: I moved to Guinea on the coast of West Africa where I retired as a DJ and dedicated my entire time to the pursuit of African Funk Records. This blog is about my travels and experiences in a region that despite being plagued by civil wars corrupt governments and other diseases has so much more to offer. Maybe this site will even inspire You to buy a plane ticket and come to visit where we all came from. You might even find things more valuable than the rarest records and sometimes you won’t even have to dig through dusty boxes to find them.

I know this column/blog is titled “Purveyor of Funk and Other Fine Vibes”, but I think this guy is the true purveyor of funk. So if you feel like reaching a little further out there in your listenings and blog-readings today, check out Voodoo Funk and get downloading.

As an added bonus, after chatting about Poly Rythmo with my good friend and one of Miami’s finest DJs and crate diggers, Mr. Brown, he shot me a YouTube video of a track with a sick beat and a crazy video involving puppets. It’s worth checking out for the song along, but the video might just make your day. It made mine.

I missed Monday’s music update. Sorry about that. Let’s just blame it on the holiday, Memorial Day. It’s not like I was taking the day off or anything. No, I was at work, grinding out another 8 hours of punching numbers into a computer, without a single open place to get a cup of coffee. God, I hate when I’m decaf.

Once, a while back, someone asked me why I never got into the laptop-DJing scene. I’ve been sticking strictly to vinyl since I got my start all those years ago. I said to the guy (and I think I was on to something) that DJing through a computer always felt too much like the button-punching I have to do at my day-job. It just wasn’t as much fun. I like the thought of getting away from the screen and getting my fingers on some actual records. Software DJing feels too much like playing a lame rhythm video game; fun for a bit, but not nearly at satisfying at the end of the day.

But I’ve got a nice set for you today from a couple of talented laptop junkies out of Bologna, Italy, that go by the name of Apes On Tapes. This set was recorded live from Sugarbabe , a really nice looking music/clothing/culture boutique in Italy that I’ll totally have to check out whenever I actually get to Europe, and put on by a group called DJs For Sale, who have some other nice mixes you might want to check out. The pictures with this update were all taken from their webpage or MySpace, and judging by the acts they book to play at the shop, they’re definitely worth keeping an ear to.

I guess I picked today’s set for a few reasons. First, it’s from a little while back, and I’ve got some good memories to it. I ended up listening to quite a lot it from my broken MD player through one cross-country road-trip last year (does north-to-south still count as “cross country”? I was crossing it, just, you know, vertically), and a road-trip is a hell of a way to put a mix to the test. I’ve been listening to it again today, and it’s still a nice set, even after a number of plays. Second… well, last week was basically a funk-ish mix, the week before that was some slower 3am downtempo stuff, so for this week smooth laptop glitchery seemed only natural.

And lastly, after finishing up the first season of Heroes last week, I just had to pick these guys after seeing how one of them had uncanny resemblance to my man Sylar. Seriously, check it out.

For the usual artist shout-outs, from what I recall in this set, there’s some Dabrye, some Slicker, and more than a few Prefuse 73 tracks, but they’re sequenced well enough not to feel like you’re getting too much repetition. You get the idea. And if you don’t, just click “Play” up top, and you will soon. Remember, if you’re looking for more music and you’ve missed any of the weekly sets (or just like reading my bitching cultural critique), you can check past editions/archives of The Unnamed Vinyl/DJ Mix Column right here.

‘Til next time, keep those playlists fresh.

The Beastie Boys have a new album, The Mix-Up, coming out within the coming month. You might have heard, you might not have — I didn’t even find out myself until recently, and details just started coming out May 1st. Word is, the album is going to drop June 26th, and will be all-instrumental (!!!), with a later version to have vocals and a wide swath of guest MCs. Sounds interesting. The thought of an instrumental album alone is enough to get my digging-fingers twitching.

Anyway, I was killing more time today looking up Beastie Boys videos on YouTube, when I noticed a new song topping my usual list of search results. It’s here! Something I’m guessing will be the first single off the new Beastie Boys album.

Without further prose, here’s The Rat Cage:

I’ll be the first to say, it’s good, but nothing too killer. minusbaby and I were talking about how songs like these tend to work better on whole albums than as singles, so we’ll see how it fits into the overall scheme of things when the full-length comes out.

Here’s the tracklisting for the new album for now:

1. “B for My Name” – 3:31
2. “14th St. Break” – 3:34
3. “Suco de Tangerina” – 3:17
4. “The Gala Event” – 3:47
5. “Electric Worm” – 3:15
6. “Freaky Hijiki” – 3:05
7. “Off the Grid” – 4:36
8. “The Rat Cage” – 3:37
9. “The Melee” – 3:10
10. “Dramastically Different” – 3:57
11. “The Cousin of Death” – 3:06
12. “The Kangaroo Rat” – 3:28

And for posterity, even though I’m usually not big on AMVs (they usually just fuck up my search results when I’m trying to stream Death Note episodes online), here’s a nicely edited Samurai Champloo video to an even nicer Beastie’s song:

If I were born in another time, I’d like to have been a wandering swordsman. For now, I’ll just keep on as a wandering record slinger.

Maybe picking Mondays for this vinyl mix column was a bad idea. I feel like I spend more time talking about what a rough goddamned Monday morning it is, not enough time getting up about the music. I don’t know what to say, I guess I just liked the sound of “The Monday Mix”. This is a comic site after all, and god knows comics love alliterations. Peter Parker. Matt Murdock. Silver Surfer. Sue Storm. Reed Richards. Monday Mix. It rolled off the tongue in a nice way.

I guess I’m pretty beat today. I was up until about 6:30am recording samples, and trying to put the polish on the mix I’m about to give you, a mix whose file my computer had it’s dirty little way with and corrupted roughly half of. I suppose I could have worked on fixing it earlier in the day, but I’d been out digging for records around Manhattan through most of the afternoon. And I suppose I could have done my digging earlier in the morning, but frankly, I was preoccupied with sleeping until 1pm, and I’m not giving that shit up for nobody on a Sunday.

Let us open the good gospel of the Digable Planets, and turn our pages to Pacifics 2:39, where the First Commandment of crate-diggers is stated in no uncertain terms: “Sunday’s to relax.”

I suppose that would make the Second Commandment “a nickle-bag of funk”, but I’m not sure where we could go from there.

First, let me get this mix out of the way. Really, I don’t know what the hell this one is about. Probably one of the most random, off-the-wall mixes I’ve done in a minute. It was kind of nice not staying in any format, bouncing all over the place like a guy who just wants to play the tunes he likes (part of the reason we started posting mixes on the internet in the first place — to play what we liked, crowds-be-damned). So this set starts one way, then goes a completely different way, and then some parts are mixed and other parts are just timed nice, and it’s got a lot of funk — like, really a whole ton of funk in yo’ trunk — though a lot of it is new ish , then there’s some good hip-hop, and some real funky hip-hop, a little stuff that sounds a lot like afrobeat, maybe some hip-hop with afrobeat-sounding chorus, and a ton of just plain random shit (Luscious Jackson? Check. Amerie? Check. Beastie Boys? Check. A funk cover of Radiohead? Check.). In fact, it’s inspiring me to make a quick GIF to draw attention to the fact. Wait here one second.

So here you have Keeping It Up, a fitting name for a Monday, coming off a long weekend that didn’t actually end until a few short hours ago. There’s actually a long story behind the Keeping It Up name and it actually comes from Singapore, but I think I spend too much time telling stories, not enough time getting to the fucking point, which is:

Dylan_Garret_-_Keeping_It_Up.mp3
(download “Keeping It Up”)

And there it is. I was planning on writing more about a few different things — the records I’d picked up this weekend, some mixes a friend kicked my way, a good article I read yesterday in a nice music magazine, some thoughts on internet radio, my plans to compile these Monday sets into an official PCS podcast — but instead I’m going to leave you with one thing.

Frosty of dublab has a nice regular (I believe) column in the back of RE:UP, a magazine I never really read much of before but one I’m starting to come around to. He’s a crazy dude, writes just the way you’d expect if you’ve ever heard him on dublab. Anyway, I noticed on Particle Pages, the dublab writing blog, a nice piece up by Frosty about procrastination. Seeing as procrastination is kind of the rub behind me being up until nearly 7am when I have to work the next day, it’s only appropriate to link here. Something fun to read while you listen. We’re a full-service blog. I’ll copy the intro if it interests you.

Frosty’s Guide To Procrastination

As I pondered what words to write for this installment of the glorious and riveting RE:UP Magazine my mind exploded with possibilities. Hmmmmm what ambitious, journalistic undertaking shall I tackle this time around? I could dive deep into my local library’s microfiche collection and spend days tracing the arc of illuminated thought in dark rooms. Unfortunately, my copy of Doorknobs for Dummies was desperately overdue so I knew library action was a bust. I could go undercover as a trance dj in Ibiza and unlock the awesome aphrodisiacal secrets of hair gel, mesh shirts, and laser lights. Alas Spain was too far. I could transcribe barnacle love songs, translate them into pigeon coos, and write a whimsical account of romance between boy and bird. Yuck.

Ideas were everywhere but so was television, bustling bars, walks in the park, myspace.com, record shopping, girls, skinny dipping, eating cereal, petting puppies, et cetera. They all reached out to me like lonely widows to a necromancer. Who was I to deny them? The minutes turned into hours, days, weeks, and yes, months. Now as I sit here long after the final deadline my mind hums with anxiety and indecision. What shall I jot down? The here and now is all consuming. My psyche shudders yet nary a word does my pen utter. Wait a minute…EUREKA! I’ve had a revelation that’s mise en scène to the max! I will write about this moment, the act of procrastination coming alive. That’s not all. I shall bestow upon future generations the priceless knowledge that is so ingrained in my veins. (note to RE:UP publisher. Please etch this article onto stone tablets.) Like the Anarchist’s Cookbook before it let this be a guiding light for those disenchanted with the heave and ho of society. Dear reader, put that oar down and pick up a potato chip because your life is about to get a whole lot better.

Jump here for the rest, including a fantastic recipe for hobo stew, lists of the laziest movies and music, history’s greatest procrastinators (top spot: God), and more.

Meanwhile…

The artist list from today’s set:

Five Deez
Luscious Jackson
Nomo
Spank Rock
The Black Keys
Cut Chemist
Quasimoto
Busdriver
Omega Watts
Mark Ronson featuring Alex Greenwald covering Radiohead
Pete Rock & CL Smooth
Amerie
Beastie Boys
Quantic
Lords of the Underground
Nobody

As always, if you have any questions about a song, drop me a line or a comment and I’d be glad to fill you in.

I’m not a big fan of most user-made YouTube videos, but this one left me and my roommate feeling pretty good last night. Maybe it’s just because the video fits so well with the song, or because the cheese-factor makes it actually seem like a lot like a real Beastie’s video. It had my roommate fooled. Here’s to the film students of the world, keeping the internet interesting.

Video aside, the song is worth it. So let’s take it back a bit, shall we?

So… what were your favorite Beastie Boys videos? You know, the real ones. I’m going to go out on a limb and say, if you’d like, to YouTube them and post ‘em as comments. Let’s spread the love!

I’m definitely still half-asleep this morning (and that’s giving myself some credit), so I’ll keep this short. The PopCultureShock Monday Mix is back! And we’ve got some original stuff this week.

It was a long, long weekend. The best kind of long weekend. New York’s post-winter hot-flashes finally settled down to a temperate spring, and 60-degree weather had called my roommate and I out to the streets in search of adventure and good records. He’s recently broken up with his girl, you see, which means it’s back to me to take the guy out and help him cope with his loss, mostly by taking him around Brooklyn digging for music, the way I do whenever I’ve got something I want to keep my mind off of. It’s kind of this routine we’ve got down. I mean, we’ve been living together for almost 2 years now. I guess that makes this the most long-term relationship I’ve ever had.

Anyway.

We spent most of Sunday afternoon killing the bins at Halcyon, in DUMBO, and drinking cold cans of Sapporo in Brooklyn Bridge Park. Made out with a few good records. A really nice Peanut Butter Wolf/Charisma joint that I hadn’t heard before, a good Ryuichi Sakamoto 12″ I’d been keeping an eye out for for a while, a couple Luscious Jackson 12″ of tracks I already had (but with some remixes I didn’t have), and some pretty nice stuff by Tundra (the Urban Quilt EP), off this new(ish) label out of, surprisingly, my neighborhood of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Okay, to be fair, they’re closer to Bushwick Ave than Bedford, but I gotta say, I didn’t know there still people in our neighborhood putting out this kind of music. I thought we were pretty much known for hipsters and LCD Soundsystem, not dope instrumental hip-hop and other fine downtempo beats. I’m pretty sure the picture on the sleeve is from around the block too, although in my half-asleep state I couldn’t tell you which exact corner. I can post a picture of it, though.

The label is Inner Current Recordings, and they’re the real deal. It looks like they’ve added Take to their roster, who had some nice stuff on Plug Research’s Sounds of LA series, and whose DJ sets I’ve also caught on Dublab.com a few times. Nice to see his work getting out there, I’ve always liked the guy. And it’s nice to see a new label popping up, especially out here in New York City (it seems like a lot of the “future roots” stuff is staying on the west coast these days), putting out solid downtempo music again. Once again, Inner Current Recordings: Check them out.

Now, despite all this chat, none of these songs are in the set I’m posting today. That’s because I picked up all these new tracks on Sunday, and recorded this little selector-style set while chilling with some friends Saturday night. The style is still the same, I suppose. A lot of future roots type stuff (that is what they’re calling it these days, right?), and, as I look back on it, kind of a Los Angeles theme going on. It was accidental, but it works.

Anyway, this Monday Mix isn’t really heavily mixed, but more of a half-radio-style set I could probably call Sometimes DJs Get Tired of Mixing. Kind of like an ode to our old days of hardcore pirate radio in Miami, only without me talking over anything. It’s got some weird stuff, some tracks more accessible than others, but still a lot of good downtempo stuff that came out this year and last year, along with a few other oddities thrown in for good measure. Hopefully, if I can churn out another set for next Monday (or, uh, the one after that), it’ll have some of the new stuff I picked up this weekend (and whatever I make out with between then and now). For now, he’s just some good tunes I had kicking around the crates but hadn’t gotten to recording yet, and a little set that seemed to fit the crowd hanging with us Saturday night. May it bless your own upcoming work-week with fine vibes and chunky beats.

(That wasn’t really “keeping it short”, huh? Ah, heh.)

The Mix.

Dylan_Garret_-_Infinite_Ways_05-14-07.mp3
(download Infinite Ways)

I didn’t have a chance to jot down all the track names yet, and don’t have the records in front of me to check, but here’s a quick rundown off the top of my head of what you’ll get in this show, with MySpace links for most in case you want to dig deeper. And, as always, tons more mixes and musical goodness up on B&C:

Clark
Umod
Ta’raach & The Lovelution
Flying Lotus
Ammoncontact
Madvillain vs Four Tet
A Tribe Called Quest
Dabrye
Sach
Georgia Anne Muldrow
Digable Planets
Milosh
Daedelus
Bonobo
Herbert
Cut Chemist

I don’t read a lot of magazines these days. Lets face it, not much can come out in monthly print mags anymore that hasn’t already been one-upped by the internet. But I am a fan of Wax Poetics for their gorgeous, detailed, in-depth writing, and XLR8R, for their coverage of a fairly wide range of DJ and music culture.

Anyway, I was kicking around their website this morning, and saw that XLR8R is putting up video content now. So, assuming the embed code I tried to wing together for this video works, here’s a pretty nice little interview with Busdriver. If it doesn’t work, I’ll probably delete this post before anyone has the chance to see it.

Anyway, here’s Busdriver. If you haven’t heard his crazy style before, it’s worth clicking just for the experience. If you’ve watched the video and want more, check our hard hitting journalistic exposé on the illicit ties between Busdriver, Can, and the PS1 classic rhythm game Parappa The Rapper.

Truth be told, I’m having kind of a shitty week, to put it mildly. A lot of bad stuff has gone down. I’m mean, I’m not going to get into the details (even if I usually jump at the chance to do that sort of thing). I just wanted to paint an image, and the image is of me, slouched down in my office chair with my headphones on, stressed the hell out and doing my best to ignore/avoid my coworkers, even though very little of the stress actually has to do with work. I’m on my fourth cup of coffee and just as many cigarettes, and it’s not even 4pm yet. There’s a headache too. That’s probably my fault.

I’m not here to bitch and whine, though. I’m just saying, maybe some of you are having a shitty day too. Personally, when times get tough, all I can do is lose myself in a stack of records. So it’s really the least I can do to give you what’s been getting me through my day.

Antena was actually a short-lived French eletro-samba group from the 1980s. The reason most people talk about them now was the Joakim remix of the 1983 Antena un-classic “Camino Del Sol”, that came out last year. That remix was a house-tinged electro-bomb, and I don’t mean “bomb” in a negative sense; I mean it was blowing up dancefloors in clubs around the globe for the better part of a year. God knows, I had some amazing nights out that culminated in sweating myself to the point of dehydration thanks to that track.

Anyway, I never really got around to playing much of the flip-side, a remix by of the same song done by Todd Terje. While the Joakim remix completely remade the song into something it never tried to be but worked well as, the Terje mix is a little more subtle take on the original, which is what I’m listening to today. Maybe I just like it more because I’ve only been hearing the Joakim version for so long. God, those melodies are gorgeous though.

Actually, it was the original song that inspired this post, though I’ll be posting the Terje mix. It’s hard to find the right song to listen to on a shitty day in the middle of a shitty week, especially when you’re at work when you’re rather be sitting under a tree in a park somewhere or something, getting your head together. But I was listening to Antena’s “Camino Del Sol” while looking at old pictures of last year’s Winter Music Conference in Miami, the parties and the sand and lifeguard huts I used to hang out in on days I didn’t have much else to do but bum around the beach and listen to music. I put on that song this morning and something just seemed right. It was mellow and calming without being pensive and depressing. It felt tropical without ever being too “over-the-top”. And it has those sexy, trashy 60s female French pop vocals, only in sung in Spanish. Just a nice tune that’ll make you feel like you can close your eyes and just float over whatever’s been bringing you down, or will at least space you out for the last few hours of an uneventful workday.

So here’s the Todd Terje take on Isabelle Antena’s “Camino Del Sol”, a song that will hopefully help the rest of the day blow by like the warm, tropical breeze I’m imagining in my head right now.

Camino_Del_Sol_Todd_Terje_Remix.mp3
(download Antena’s “Camino Del Sol (Todd Terje Remix)”)

And because I have it on hand, and I don’t have the original on hand, I’ll include that “Now For Something Completely Different” remix by Joakim. Listen to the first one if you’re feeling mellow, the second one if you feel like spacing out into some electronica, dancing, and/or doing some drugs. Not that I condone that sort of thing. Really.

camino_del_sol_joakim_remix.mp3
(download Antena’s “Camino Del Sol (Joakim Remix)”)

If I can dig up the original when I get home, I’ll put it up in here too. Until then, hope you enjoy some Antena.

Man, it’s been a long month.

First, I ended up at a Buddhist Temple in New Hampshire for an Asian New Years thing, which was an experience in and of itself that I wrote at more detail in a yet-to-be-published article about Pokémon. Later that same weekend I’d be stuck on a $15 Chinatown bus in the middle of a flood on the way back to NYC from Boston. One weekend later I’d be pushing my way through a thousands-thick crowd of Pikachu cosplayers at the Pokémon Diamond/Pearl launch party, held at the Nintendo World Store in Rockafeller Plaza. Until that day, I’d never touched a Pokémon game in my life. It was an experience as well, its fans no less devoted to their cause than the Buddhists I’d met earlier.

A week later, I’d be at the Sakura Matsuri (Cherry Blossom Festival) in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. Oddly, and perhaps frighteningly, there were some cosplayers there too. I still don’t know what Naruto headbands have to do with with cherry blossoms, but I didn’t really bother to ask. A few days before that I bought a new mixer (Numark DMX09) I couldn’t really afford, and had been coming to work late with bloodshot eyes on a daily basis because of my late-night musical fucking-arounds, which really isn’t good seeing as we’re supposed to be having this big website redesign project we’re all working on dilligently.

I guess I’m trying to say what I already said, that it’s been a long few weeks.

So I guess I’m trying to apologize. I set out on PopCultureShock to spread as music as far as my fingers could manage, and I’ve gotten sidetracked. But, I am coming to you today with not one but two original tunes “debuting” here on PCS, I suppose, courtesy of Bridge & Causeway, a little music whatever we run courtesy of PCS. It’s a symbiotic relationship, I suppose. I’m hoping to run more of these posts, and working on a few “exclusive” mixes for PCS. Sort of a PopCultureShock Soundtrack, if you will. Here’s just hoping I can get my shit together and keep it up on a regular basis.

So I’ve been working the new mixer hard, trying to figure out what does what, and get it set up to record right. I put together this quick little mash-up track while I was at it. It’s got some DJ Mehdi beats, off Ed Banger’s Records (check the label out if you’re still sleeping!), and vocals from Slum Village’s “Do You” (original track produced by Dilla, I believe). It was just a little test, done in one take, so the quality isn’t computer-polished or nothin’, just working out the new effects I got, but it turned out sounding catchy enough to make a few trips through my iPod on the morning commute, so hopefully some folks up on hip-hop around here might dig it as well.

DJ_Mehdi_w_Slum_Village_(a_Dylan_Garret_mash).mp3
(download “DJ Mehdi w/ Slum Village (a Dylan Garret mash)”)

Today’s next track comes from Sami Suova, out of Helsinki, Finland, keyboardist in a rather well known Finnish electro-rock-pop band (did I just make that genre up?) who’s name I’ll withhold by request, and former roommate and music collaborator of mine during his New York travels. He gave me the okay to post his latest track on PCS, a house remix of Finnish rock band The Sweeties’s “Magazine Lassie”. His remix kind of reminds me of some good ol’ Factory Records, Hacienda-style late-80s/early-90s, “love thy neighbor (and do a shitload of ecstacy)” house music. Then again, maybe I’m projecting from the time we watched 24 Hour Party People at 2am and spent half the night making cheesy house tracks on my Korg DDD-1. Our only rule was that everything had to have pianos. Regardless, this new remix of his gave me a nice, warm, old-school house vibe that made me think I need to get back into some more uptempo work myself. And hell, that’s usually the mark of a good track, when it makes you want to work on something new yourself.

So here you go, the Schmamix of The Sweeties’s “Magazine Lassie”.

Magazine_Lassie_(Schmamix).mp3
(download “Magazine Lassie (Schmamix)”)

And there you are, a little dirty hip-hop, a little house. Maybe rock next time? Don’t ever let anyone tell you PCS isn’t about diversity. Either way, ’til next time, keep those playlists fresh…

(Note: Pictures by Bridge & Causeway DJ and newfound photographer Mr. Brown, of the 2006 Winter Music Conference in Miami. The atmosphere from each one (maybe it helps that I was there when they were taken) really reminds me of what I love about music. Anyway, I’ll try and hassle him for the shots from this year’s and put them up when I can.)