tracks

from the upcoming album Oddisee "The Good Fight" (5/5)
https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/the-good-fight/id969829649

In a landscape overrun with abstract indulgence and shallow trend-chasers, the Prince George’s County, Maryland artist Oddisee has created 'The Good Fight', a record that reminds you that it’s music before it’s hip-hop. Due May 5th on Mello Music Group, it’s for the fans and for himself. It finds the musical heavyweight balancing between craft, career, and successfully growing into the world around him. Stream the first single, "That's Love".

Album Description:
Oddisee makes music that rattles in your bone marrow. It’s imbued with love, honesty, and selflessness. It’s virtuosic in its musicality, direct in its language, and infinitely relatable.
 
In a landscape overrun with abstract indulgence and shallowtrend-chasers, the Prince George’s County, Maryland artist has created “The Good Fight,” a record that reminds you that it’s music before it’s hip-hop. Released on Mello Music Group, it’s for the fans and for himself. It finds the musical heavyweight balancing between craft, career, and successfully growing into the world around him.
 
For Oddisee, “The Good Fight” is about living fully as a musician without succumbing to the traps of hedonism, avarice, and materialism. It’s about not selling out and shilling for a paycheck, while still being aware that this is a business requiring compromise and collaboration.
 
It’s music that yields an intangible feeling: the sacral sound of an organ whine, brass horns, or a cymbal crash. It’s not necessarily the syllables, but rather what they evoke. A song like “That’s Love” is more than a declaration; it’s a meditation on our capacity to love and the bonds binding us together. Ambition and greed war with our sense of propriety. “Contradiction’s Maze” offers a list of paradoxes we all face (“I want to tell the truth when it hurts/but when it comes to me, I want the blow softened.”)
 
Oddisee’s production simmers in its own orchestral gumbo. You sense he’s really a jazzman in different form, inhabiting the spirit of Roy Ayers and other past greats.  The Fader’s compared him to a musical MC Escher, calling hailing his “grandiose and symphonic sound” and “relevant relatable messages.” Pitchfork praised his “eclectic soulful boom-bap.”
 
“The Good Fight” acknowledges the stacked odds, but refuses to submit.
 
It’s both universal and personal. The child of a Sudanese immigrant highlights the rigors of his own upbringing: his pregnant mother working the register until she was about to burst, his pops’ shuttered diner that couldn’t survive Reaganomics—the one that Oddisee drives past every time he returns home, just to remind him how quickly the world can turn bad.
 
It’s these minor details that add into something major. It’s testament to the indelible nature of art: when you can turn what you love into something that lasts.


Oddisee - That's Love

https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/time-astonishing!/id1000803681

Coming July 24th from Mello Music Group, Time? Astonishing! is the latest dimensional warp from hip-hop’s premiere astral traveler. His union with MMG producer L’Orange finds him exploring uncharted terrain: choppy volcanic rock planets, ice glacier moons, new surgical procedures, and fresh rappers to toss into the ether. The scalpel remains eternally sharp.
 
Even a flying DeLorean seems too conventional for the Bronx legend. He’d more logically orbit throughout the galaxy in a gleaming chrome spaceship, teaching the stars and aliens new forms of originality. He is too weird to live, too rare to die, too uniquely ultra-magnetic to be accurately mimicked.
 
L’Orange’s production appropriately coaxes the most appealingly baffling gonzo vision from Keith since his days collaborating with Dan “The Automator” Nakamura. This isn’t the noir-rap of L’Orange’s previous work, but something atmospheric, ethereal, and absurd.
 
Yet there’s a sense of tradition within the playfulness. The beats glow with radioactive grit. Hard enough to knock from your car speakers, cinematic and plutonium-propelled enough to transport you to strange terra firma. Buck Rodgers movie serials meet boom-bap. And along for the odyssey are a cast of the best underground MC’s of the last decade: Blu, Open Mike Eagle, Mr. Lif, J-Live, and more.
 
Welcome to the new world, even more sinister and suspenseful than the last one. We live inastonishing times: abstract, absurd, and indelibly Kool.

L'Orange & Kool Keith - The Traveler (feat. J - Live)

Chicago's Verbal Kent (of Ugly Heroes) releases the first single from his upcoming album "Anesthesia."  The new single features the one and only Gangsta Gibbs and is produced by Detroit producer Apollo Brown.  The new album comes out September 11th but you can get the single now: https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/anesthesia/id1013505938

VERBAL KENT feat. FREDDIE GIBBS - "SUITCASE SWITCH" (prod. Apollo Brown)

from the Apollo Brown album "Grandeur" http://geni.us/32Ft

No one knows the rugged soul of Detroit hiphop like Apollo Brown. He's embraced the gospel of the drums and has brought on the chorus of legendary New York rap group M.O.P. to help ignite the same passions in us. 

From Apollo Brown's upcoming album, the first single "Detonate" displays the grandiose grit of high octane boom bap meets action flick energy. From Detroit to New York, not all that glitters is gold. Grandeur is coming 9.25.15. 

Apollo Brown - Detonate (feat. M.O.P.)

"The Lavishments of Light Looking" (featuring George Clinton, prod. Flying Lotus)by Flying Lotus, Shabazz Palaces, Thundercat [EXPLICIT]

Download this track for FREE at adultswim.com/singles beginning September 28 at 12p EST.


WOKE(Flying Lotus, Shabazz Palaces, Thundercat) f George Clinton - The Lavishments of Light Looking

Finale - Plain View (feat. Bilal Salaam)

from the album BAD NEIGHBOR
http://rappcats.com/shop/bad-neighbor

VINYL

MED BLU MADLIB feat. MF DOOM - Knock Knock

from the new Apollo Brown album "Grandeur" http://geni.us/32Ft
produced by APOLLO BROWN


Apollo Brown - Who's That (feat. Maffew Ragazino & Freddie Gibbs)

Download the complete album instrumentals here:
https://lorange360.bandcamp.com/album/time-astonishing-instrumentals

L'Orange & Kool Keith - The Green Ray (instrumental)

The B-Boy has returned. Legendary Boston MC Mr. Lif has signed a multi-album deal with Mello Music Group for 2016 & 2017.  His first new project will be out by early next year, but to hold fans over, MMG will reissue his classic album I Phantom on November 27th.

For those new to this classic, I Phantom showcases production by El-P, Edan, Insight, DJ Fakts One, and NASA. Add to that guest features from Aesop Rock, Jean Grae, and Akrobatik. 

“I’ve been very active musically for years but I haven’t been putting records out,” Lif says. “I’ve been touring the world with Thievery Corporation and otherwise living in the studio, constantly making songs.”  Lif’s new slate of music is as progressive and searing as ever. 
 
If you’re even vaguely familiar with post-millennium underground hip-hop, you know all about the MC born Jeffrey Haynes. Over the course of four solo EPs and albums, Lif established himself as one of hip-hop’s most brilliant thinkers and triumphantly defiant voices. He spoke truth to power  like few others: indicting racism, the inequities of late Capitalism, and political corruption. 
 
His new songs figure to define this new age, by highlighting what has changed and how much regrettably has stayed the same. 
 
The partnership with Mello came out about organically. The link between the former Def Jux linchpin and Mello was obvious: they’re both known for uncompromised raw music with integrity, dedicated to both tradition and progression.
 
Set for release on November 27th, Lif’s classic debut album titled, I Phantom is the start to a long partnership. Lif promises his new work will be the most soul baring of his career — records that chronicle his ups and downs and the ebbs and flows of life.  

"It was a very intentional decision to remain unsigned by any record label until I was absolutely ready. That personal journey spanned from 2007 to 2015. I needed to step back and gain perspective on a great many things", Lif says. "I waited the right amount of time. I grew. I recorded an abundance of new material over the years, found the right record label, and now it's time to come back and start round two of my career."



Mr. Lif - Return Of The B-Boy (prod. El-P)

From the upcoming "Day Drunk - EP"  11/27/2015
produced by Red Pill

Detroit’s Red Pill released his solo Mello Music debut album “Look What This World Did To Us” earlier this year. The record was striking because of it’s straight-forward, intellectually broken, Bukowski-like realism. The photos were serious, brooding, and the lyrics were heavy and genuine. Enter the Day Drunk EP.
 
Red Pill starts on top of a clock-ticking, mind-mesmerizing, introductory track from UK producer Paul White.  After a philosopher-king monologue, the Zen Buddhist meditative chant begins – “Don’t work, just party - you’ll be alright. Don’t try so hard. Just live your life.” But Pill never leaves you insightfully dumb, with lines like “I think we need a new religion / wound up, bound up in submission / getting lost in the mission / false definitions/ be causing derision / all these people talkin’ competition / all these people talkin’ is division…” And then the record gets green lit.
 
You may recognize the next Alex Goose-produced track from Silicon Valley. Red Pill lays hardworking slacker ambition bare in one dumb, drunk, punch over the energetic beat. The song is as ludicrously lavish as Scorsese’s “Wolf Of Wall Street.” The album moves into happy-hour heartstrings unfurling with a song for those who’d rather stay inside, those who, “outside of their mind, don’t know what’s real.” This is for those who can never fall asleep without a helper, “a little gin and seltzer,” as Red Pill puts it. Blu joins the 3 o’clock session, laying bars over an Oddisee-produced, rainy kitchen window thought piece. But, like any good rap savior, Red Pill pulls us back up from the depths with Exile’s upbeat “Porn & Milk.” The Day Drunk EP is a record to wash away the feeling when your cash is gone.
 
Today, Red Pill is on some “love life” shit. 
Bottoms up. Day Drunk begins now.

Red Pill - Day Drunk

1st single off the upcoming project dropping Summer 2016

Exclusively Produced by HansSOLO in Collaboration with Michigan-based rapper Sincere, also featured on Statik Selektah's album "What Goes Around"

https://soundcloud.com/sincere616

-2015 Cover art by Andy Miller Of Orange Cap Productions -
 https://twitter.com/orange__cap

HansSOLO // Sincere - Carpe Diem

Pre-order 'Jungle Revolution In Dub' -
Big Dada: http://found.ee/jungledub
iTunes: http://found.ee/jungledub-it
Bandcamp: http://found.ee/jungledub-bc
Amazon: http://found.ee/jungledub-az

Official video: https://youtu.be/uJ9yqeQHJBU

Taken from 'Jungle Revolution in Dub' released 13th November 2015 on Big Dada.

Follow Congo Natty -
Facebook: http://found.ee/congonatty-fb
Twitter: http://found.ee/congonatty-tw
Instagram: http://found.ee/congonatty-in
Spotify: http://found.ee/congonatty-sp

http://congonatty.com/
http://bigdada.com

Jungle Revolution in Dub

Revolution In Dub (DJ Madd Remix)

Pre-order

‘Kneedelus’ Out Now -
Brainfeeder: http://found.ee/kneedelus
iTunes: http://found.ee/kneedelus-it
Spotify: http://found.ee/kneedelus-sp

Taken from ‘Kneedelus’, released 27th November 2015 on Brainfeeder.

Following game-changing releases from Thundercat and Kamasi Washington in 2015, Brainfeeder once again dips into LA's crucible of jazz and deep electronics to shine the spotlight on instrumental quintet Kneebody’s collaboration with electronic veteran and serial innovator Daedelus. A multi-headed beast straddling rock, jazz, and electronic music, the ten-song set titled Kneedelus explores the theory of technological singularity - the notion that humans and computer technology will increasingly blend together - in spirited and enterprising style. 

Follow ‘Daedelus’ -
Facebook: http://found.ee/daedelus-fb
Twitter: http://found.ee/daedelus-tw

Follow ‘Kneebody’ - 
Facebook: http://found.ee/kneebody-fb
Twitter: http://found.ee/kneebody-tw

http://daedelusmusic.com
http://kneebody.com

http://brainfeeder.net

Out Now

Kneebody & Daedelus - 'Drum Battle'

My version of a Law & Order tale, told thru rhyme

The Drama   Episode 1

Los Angeles duo Ras Kass and Jack Splash, the Oxymorons known as Semi Hendrix ,have been releasing a broad spectrum array of sounds ever since the announcement of their new record “Breakfast At Banksy’s.” One of producer Jack Splash’s strongest suits is the ability to fuse any genre into a fresh blend of driving movements for your speakers. From the more straightforward underground production on the single “Jesus Pressed Mute” to the dizzyingly distorted “Bukowski,” Jack Splash and Ras Kass have quickly established a unique brand of funk and rock infused rap that sits atop the underground of sounds. 

Perhaps the most mainstream of any song on their new record, “Sex Pistol” is an unabashed reminder of the things that drive the baser among us – physical beauty, lust, and sex. And who better to lace the hook than everybody’s favorite ATLien, CeeLo Green. From “Cell Therapy” to singing “Fuck You” at an Obama fundraiser, CeeLo Green has consistently been the go to voice for soul. Here he lends his legendary pipes to Jack Splash’s up-tempo “Sex Pistol” while Ras Kass leans into his first and most universal vice – beautiful women.
credits


Semi Hendrix feat. CeeLo Green - "Sex Pistol"

Remix of "Just Due" from the album "Odds & Ends"
itunes.apple.com/us/album/odds-ends/id1002457618

DJ Lenn Swann on the cuts

FINALE - Just Due Ft. Homeboy Sandman & Miz Korona (D - ski The Illeagle Remix)

from Red Pill's upcoming Day Drunk EP (11/27)
Digital Greatness: http://geni.us/DetroitRedPill

Double Rainbow Vinyl: http://www.undergroundhiphop.com/red-pill-day-drunk-ep/MMG00081LP/

vocals by Red Pill
produced by Alex Goose
art by Ruff Mercy

About Day Drunk EP
It’s the return of the non-fiction writer stranded in the made-up world. We last heard from Michigan’s Red Pill on his Mello Music Group debut, this spring’s Look At What This World Did To Us—a savage and sardonic diatribe against the modern condition.
 
In the interim, the former factory machinist turned his psychic bloodletting into a sustainable career. Things finally look up for the self-proclaimed “Leonard Letdown.” He toured the EU with Fashawn and Exile, spent the early fall on a 40 city North American tour with Murs, and forged a profound connection with a fanbase exhausted from the lies told to us by politicians, rappers, and ourselves.
 
Its immediate follow-up—the Day Drunk EP—offers a requisite counterbalance to the poison-tipped bleakness of its predecessor. If LAWTWDTU was the rap equivalent of Charles Bukowski’s Ham on Rye, the Day Drunk EP is closer to Notes From a Dirty Old Man. It’s slightly lighter and more playful, stocked with slick talk, wry one-liners, and enough liquor to drown even the most debauched barfly.
 
With production from Oddisee, Exile, Paul White, and Red Pill himself, the beats offer an almost psychedelic slant that blend seamlessly with Pill’s artful complaints. Whereas the last record seemed to sink into a permanent midnight of the soul, this one attempts to reconcile the inequities of life with our own ineluctable realities.
 
The first song, “What You Wish For,” finds Pill half-jokingly offering the advice to give up on work in favor of the 24-hour party. It’s not necessarily a call to hedonism, but rather a way to remind people to wake up from fugue states filled with false religion and Internet pseudo-wisdom.
 
There’s the greasy guitars and hard drums of “90s Money,” a sly love letter towards a vanished world. Pill calls himself a “loser like a Beck record,” a “fat Jesse Einsenberg"  a loose cannon drinking whiskey with two hands, listening to Bitches Brew, eating chicken vindaloo. That’s just in the first minute.
 
Despite the brighter beats and attempt to find levity in our woes, there’s still the searing fear and loathing that makes Pill so compelling. He compares himself to an unloaded gun, maligns the world that’s got him by the throat. He confesses his myriad anxieties, depression, and desire to write a happy song. Only Earl Sweatshirt can match Red Pill at their mutual ability to celebrate the isolated joy of never wanting to leave the house.
 
Maybe it’s the EP’s finale and title track that captures the contradictions at the heart of the music. It’s a eulogy to the summertime, a drinking song undercut by premonitions of doom, a reminder for us not to waste the days until our funeral—a toast to day drinking to forget our own collective pain.




Red Pill - 90s Money(prod. Alex Goose)

For promo use only, Make sure you go out and purchase the original. 

Enjoy

x5 dubs & Solo 45 - Feed em to the lions remix

"Jazz Hop" is the first single and title track from the upcoming collaborative project bearing the same name, from Argentinian musician/producer Gas-Lab and hip-hop artist, Traum Diggs. 

"This project is about the global power and influence of hip-hop music and how it can be used to unify (across) cultures, continents, and languages. We dedicate this project to lovers of jazz, lovers of hip-hop, and to the pioneers who came before us. We conspired to inspire a rebirth of a jazz-influenced hip-hop sound on the dawn of an electronic wave that is poised to dominate the genre for the foreseeable future. Maybe we’re brave; maybe we’re stupid, only time and our fans will tell." Traum Diggs 

<a href="https://theartistunion.com/tracks/ac300c" rel="nofollow">Download for free on The Artist Union</a>

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