Armand Hammer & JPEGMAFIA - My Thoughts On Barbarians Dying

Extrasensory perception is just extra-sensitive hearing, the ability to tap someone's subvocalization, i.e,. thought patterning its way to speech. Ever go to a rap show and feel like you knew all the words to a song even though you'd only heard it once or twice? Or never? Ever rap along to a song's first performance? Of course, this could go the other way, too—a much more common occurrence I'd imagine. ROME is my favorite album of all time. "Barbarians" runs neck and neck with "Pakistani Brain" for my favorite song on my favorite album of all time. A fun little aside here: one time in Minneapolis, when Armand Hammer was supporting Ceschi, they opened with "Pakistani Brain" (as they often did for a stretch), and I forgot the opening lines to woods' first verse three times in a row. Living out there, imagining some rivalry between Minnesota and Wisconsin sports teams, I kept wanting to jump into "Whitey swept through like Green Bay," the beginning of his second verse. I believe I only made the mistake aloud once. But I digress. One might could say the way "Barbarians" bled into "Overseas" set the stage for the sequencing of every Armand Hammer album thereafter. It also made putting together this blend of "Barbarians" and "My Thoughts On Neogaf Dying" significantly more challenging than it sounds. In celebration of Peggy's placements all over We Buy Diabetic Test Strips, a phenomenal musical reunion, albeit one potentially overshadowed by DJ Stitches' involvement with the WBDTS Players, here's that blend. After after you might be surprised who’d clap, who scattered, who’d survive, who captured, with the Jew in the rafters. Free every goddamn body. Happy Chanukah.

KILLKURT - KURT MUST DIE 3

Just because you're paranoid do[es]n't mean they're not after you. The best freestyles ever recorded likely live only in a megamarket corporate office's Google Drive folder labeled surveillance footage. May a sentient language model one day learn from it to unironically obsolete another executive position. Get rich and dine tyrant, the most dangerous game. In this sense, KURT MUST DIE 3 recalls an anecdote, mysteriously wiped from the internet, about Marx and Engels walking the streets of London. Passing some royal estate or another, Engels says imagine, one day nobody will live like this anymore, to which Marx goes nah, bro, everyone's going to live like this, like, that's the whole point.

Anna Catalanotto & Fony Wallace - Mind Of Horror With A Pretty Girl Aura

"I can't, I can't vibe with none of you. I don't even want to." That used to be me talking to the tools at Home Depot when dad dragged me along as a kid. Now, I find myself making lists of things I need to get there. Move two-to-three-prong outlet adapters to the top of that list. "Truth Hurts Interlude" yields the blunted-edge lyric at the top of this post. As it happens, it also concisely summarizes the Rakim-Dre collaboration that never was. But I digress. Mind Of Horror With A Pretty Girl Aura has more than a lovely voice and a clever near-rhyme going for it. Catalanotto and Wallace's tragic siren call also has vinyl, CDs, shirts and stickers, oh my. Vibe with all that and then some.

Gray to Dayglo: Black & White Roots of the Daisy Age

November 11, 2021, Bonhams London, New Bond Street sells at auction Six Original Studies for the De La Soul '3 Feet High and Rising' Debut Album Artwork at 32,250 British pound sterling. The auction house describes the lot's centerpiece as a "black and white photographic print with Posca paint pen art work on acetate overlay bearing the band and album name with floral design motifs, adhered with small pieces of tape to each side, stamped Grey Organisation along lower right margin." May 21, 1985, the Gray Organisation (GO) artists collective executes an "art terrorist attack" on London's Cork Street galleries, splattering their front windows with grey paint. Some years later, GO founder Toby Mott has De La Soul over to the collective's Grand Street, Manhattan loft for the 3 Feet High and Rising cover shoot. Prior to this encounter, Mott and co. film the video for "Potholes in My Lawn" in Amityville. The Super 8 recording begins in anarchic black-and-white stop-motion not so far removed from the Organisation's founding aesthetic. "We parodied yuppie and Soviet corporate monoculture with our uniformed anonymity, shaved heads, white shirts, English suits, making and exhibiting art as product without individual authorship, something inspired from the rigorous orthodoxy of Crass." The video ends in color. The cover shoot follows a similar trajectory. "We laid the trio down on the floor of our loft with their heads almost touching and took a black and white photo from above. They seemed mystified. We added the dayglo background and, since the daisy-age concept suggested flowers, I drew some on with Posca paint pens, which were the new thing, very popular with graffiti artists." Thus, from the Situationist International origins of Crass (dé)collage, filtered through an acid house revival of psychedelic flower power, "The whole visual identity of the Daisy Age was born." Bonus trivia: Mott goes on to operate the Biz Markie puppet on the cover of Master Ace's "Me and the Biz" single and direct the video for Public Enemy's "Shut 'Em Down."

Magnetic the Shaman & Brainorchestra - "Hand Over Fist" ft. DøøF, Lungs​/​/​LoneSword & phiik

Brain fog bullet point dispensation:

• Magnetic the Shaman is why Philly remains my second favorite city

• His 2023 album with Brainorchestra, Can't Wait for Patience = 🔥🚒🔥

• That's a firetruck on fire

• DøøF reps Virginia but I heard from around the way he used to stay in Merrick

• Me when Lungs says "Hakuna ... Matata": 💀

• For my money this is the best Phiik has ever sounded

• Seven "Days of Madness" until Planet X

• Me with "Hakuna ... Matata" stuck in my head: 🦁

Cashmere P & Ray Robinson connect like the GWB

Sixth-borough ties between Long Island and New Jersey go back generations, from Redman dropping acid on Erick Sermon's couch to Hammond organ rascals rocking the Austin Boulevard pothole tract. Into this tradition comes the collaboration of Jersey City rapper Cashmere P and Deer Park-by-way-of-Roosevelt producer Ray Robinson. Their latest Seven Bakin arrives in the wake of 2022's Skyberry. Those and more dwell below like boardwalk miscreants. And it's all marvelously deadly as the '90s comics that today's comic nerds now pretend to hate even though their entire mental aesthetic is based off of that shit.

Carolyn Harding - "Memories" and "More Memories"

To some, intergenerational transmission of trauma remains a tenuous theory at best. The eggs are already in place, they say. But to them, I say, fine, what if it's just an evolutionary defense mechanism? I have anxiety for the same reason I know not to stick my head in a lion's mouth. Memory extinction or extinction memory? It goes both ways. Don't believe the hype, true, but do look both ways before crossing the street. YOLO, so stand clear of the closing doors and behind the yellow line while the train approaches. In unrelated findings, B-Wyze's sister is house music legend Carolyn Harding (indeed the picture for that last post comes from a radio show they co-host). YouTube calls her 1986 single "Memories" a Paradise Garage classic. Thirty-seven years later, Harding honors such memories of "Memories" with yet "More Memories." 

B-Wyze - "If U Don't Know"

The world needs more drive-in movie theaters. I don't mean Ace Hardware parking lot pop-ups. I mean massive open areas with multiple fields, each with its own jumbo screen and radio frequency. Kids tossing frisbees in the lanes before the previews start. A nightly tailgate party for art, not sports. Long Island's last, in Westbury, closed in 1998. But the sound of the drive-in movie experience lived on through the turn of the 21st century via the beats of MF DOOM and X-Ray da Mindbenda. This 2005 X-Tacy Radio x-clusive featuring former Legion of D.U.M.E. member B-Wyze is a prime example. 

ethereal loft. - [ d o w n t h e r a b b i t h o l e ] 🐇

Tomorrow morning, if we get up and out early enough, at least an hour before sunrise, go to the beach, and look east just over the horizon, we might spot a one-inch green streak in the pre-dawn sky. It's a comet that takes about 435 years to orbit the sun. That means the last time it was visible to the naked eye was around 1588, and the next time will be 2458 assuming some interstellar incident doesn't knock it or us off course between now and then (🤞). May it greet us from its ethereal loft with the words above and sounds below.

Lonny Love - Hoechella 2

Sometimes sexy is such an understatement it's a misnomer. In the deft care of Lonny Love, sexy drill is endearing, romantic, precious ... in a word, lovely. Even at his most detached, his lyrics retain a degree of tender worshipfulness. He's not just palming a cheek, he's slipping a digit. He's doing the most. Hoechella 2 is a collection of bordello balladry. An ambitious enough listener might adapt any rap album for cabaret theatre, but it's a different story when every song on the project actively lends itself to the task. The sample stabs on Hoechella 2 might as well be headboard squeaks, the bass bumps mattress thumps. In moments of instrumental dropout, it's like the beat's biting a pillow. Several mattresses had to be put out to the curb in the making of this album. "Shake your ass, you made it. I'm proud of you, girl."