"Peace to Roky Erickson / Peace to Bo Derek / So lost in the television / Walk with the elephants / To die by their relatives / Lushlife holy ghost / Float through the tenements / Back to irrelevance"

From the moment you hear the bristling boom-bap chorus on album-opener "Totally Mutual Feeling," it becomes apparent that Lushlife's third full-length finds the Philadelphia rapper-producer at his most introspective. Themes of isolation and mortality permeate Ritualize, a cinematic hour-long odyssey co-produced by enigmatic production trio, CSLSX (pronounced "Casual Sex") and featuring contributions from Ariel Pink, Killer Mike, Freeway, Marissa Nadler, RJD2, and more. With CSLSX at the boards, an entire universe opens up for Lush, where the pulsating Juno synths of '80s LA night music sit side-by-side with gorgeously propulsive indie-leaning jams, and low-fi soul burners too. The resulting LP is a post-blog-era joint that seems to exhale the whole of the 20th century in a single, fascinating breath.

"After toiling over two self-produced LPs in the last half-decade, I felt compelled to bring on an outside production team for Ritualize," Lushlife (born Raj Haldar) explains. "Not only did I want to broaden the musical palette, but I felt like the group production effort would give me a depth of focus on lyrical content and emotion that I hadn't previously been afforded." After a chance encounter with CSLSX, who had been quietly self-releasing low-fi dance gems to remarkable organic blog buzz, the newly-formed team set out on a three-year journey that would eventually yield their new joint album. By the time work began on Ritualize, Lush had already been riding a small wave of critical acclaim for his 2012 full-length, Plateau Vision, an album that made several year-end lists and was described by the Sunday New York Times as a melding of "captivating rhymes with audacious, gorgeous production." Still, with Ritualize, Lushlife and CSLSX seem to have gone one deeper.

From album cut, "The Waking World," which finds Lushlife spitting thorough sixteens from the vantage of Mark David Chapman lying in wait for John Lennon, to "Incantation," a song that's as much inspired by Allen Ginsberg's Howl as the general, street-level anxieties of urban life, Ritualize is nothing short of a step forward. For proof, look no further than "Toynbee Suite," a 10-minute, 4-movement rap epic that explores the strange Toynbee Tile meta-art conspiracy that has captivated Philadelphians for decades. As the centerpiece of the album, "Toynbee Suite" was the subject of a 2013 documentary, and itself represents the combined work of 20+ musicians, including RJD2, Nightlands, Yikes the Zero, and a full chamber orchestra. On the other hand, the CSLSX-produced, "Hong Kong (Lady of Love)," a collaboration with weird music godhead, Ariel Pink, is a sparse yet powerful four-on-the-floor ode to LA, inspired by the film soundtrack work of Giorgio Moroder, Vangelis, and others.

"My Los Angeles / My Philadelphiatic / Coke flow Vangelis / Synth rap evangelist"

And once you start looking for it, the fingerprint of Los Angeles is everywhere on Ritualize. In fact, much of the album was written and recorded as Lushlife made monthly back-and-forth trips between Philadelphia and the west coast. "At some point in early 2014, while dealing with a tumultuous, failing relationship and bouts of depression, I started to suffer from writer's block, too," the rapper recounts. "After awhile, I realized that I was getting my best writing done at 30,000 feet, where distractions were minimal and I felt alone but not lonely." So, while Lushlife's 2009 debut album, Cassette City, might be his take on east coast hip-hop classicism, and Plateau Vision is some kind of pilgrim's progress to find a hidden America, Ritualize completes the triptych, arriving in LA with a sense of manifest destiny.

OFFICIAL BIO
Regarded upon his 2006 arrival as a promising beatmaker looming in the shadows of J Dilla, Madlib, waterfalls and Dabrye, Steven Ellison -- known as Flying Lotus -- nullified all comparisons only two years later with Los Angeles. On that album, his first of five for the Warp label, Ellison distilled a uniquely crisp, spasmodic, and heady sound with elements of hip-hop, avant-garde jazz, IDM, and dubstep. While the abovementioned producers fueled Ellison, he had also been excited as a youngster by the '90s West Coast rap classics that combined programming and live instrumentation. His sound continued to develop as he put his own twist on the approach, recording with a crop of jazz musicians including the indispensable likes of bassist Thundercat and strings master Miguel Atwood-Ferguson. This process began with the turbulent 2010 set Cosmogramma and peaked in terms of acclaim in 2014 with You're Dead!, which crashed the Top 20 of the Billboard 200 and spawned the Kendrick Lamar collaboration "Never Catch Me," a Grammy nominee for Best Dance Recording. Ellison devoted a few years to various forms of film work and the operation of his revered Brainfeeder label, and returned in 2019 with Flamagra, his second consecutive album to top Billboard's Dance/Electronic chart.

Reaching further into a world washed over by movements of weirdness.

K: a conspiracy of gravediggers, spies, swim instructors and international pop stars. There are hangmen and there are saints. K as a label has released cassettes, phonograph records and compact discs documenting the audio works of over 150 artists. The main focus K of has been artists working in and around Olympia, Washington, where K is based, but has included comrades from across the U.S.A. and as far away as Japan, Scotland, Australia, Canada, Germany and England. Yes, k explodes the teenage underground into passionate revolt against the corporate ogre world-wide.

Colleagues in the International Pop Underground collide at the K vanishing point. The sounds cross back and forth through a number of genres, some known and some less so: punk, hip hop, atom-powered folk-pop, haunted garage, restless singer-songwriter, epic soul shock, noise expirements, blurred-eye visionary psychedelia, roadhouse mod and the silent film soundtracks composed by Timothy Brock, as performed by the Olympia Chamber Orchestra.

In describing K to a friend, you might say: Hit the streets to the motorbike beat of the cranked and crush crashpop. Raise the standard and hail: a revolution come and gone behind your eyes. Blood and sand and sidewalk. Radio blast the punk pop implosion that is the new breed: a bee in your bonnet, love in a goldfish bowl, zombie rockin behind the iron curtain. Hey, love rocker, pull on your slacks and Mexican army boots, get ready for some sonic pogo action. Jazz the glass, here they come, screaming and clawing, scooters and dune buggies roaring. Bless. Can you dig it? K Collaborators. King loser and teenage underground. Screech and saw. Buzz. Cut. Spin. Slice. Crush. Squirt. Sweaty basement rock and rule. A crown of barbed wire for your hooded throne. Lose it on the ball and chain.

Hey, gravedigger: ignite. 

The label of Animal Collective and friends!

Formed in 2007, Flat Mary Road is a band whose instrumentation is informed by the indie rock recordings of the late 1980s, whose vocals borrow from Appalachian folk and radio announcers, and whose lyrics seek to narrate American life both pastoral and urban.

A new full-length album "Driving with the Numen" will be self-released on January 13th, 2017. 

Steve Teare - Vocals/Guitar
Dan Papa - Bass/Vocals
Alex Irwin - Drums/Vocals
Alex Lewis - Guitar/Vocals

steveteare is following