Folk & Stress - The Box

Folk & Stress are two brothers from Long Island who were set to release a box-packaged album called The Box on Think Differently in 2010 in conjunction with NYC clothing store Alife. There was a single with GZA and a tracklist with features from Aesop Rock, Vast Aire, Blue, and Bronze Nazareth. But the album never dropped. All of this was very strange to me as I had rapped with Stress at a random block party in Wantagh years earlier. Folk was not at the party. As it happens, years later, Folk would resurface as one half of the Fool's Gold electro-pop duo Party Supplies and produce Action Bronson's Blue Chips albums. Anyway, as of 2021, vinyls and CDs are out via Black Stone of Mecca.

Anamorphic - I Should Be Dead

What happens to collaborations deferred? Do ideas have ghosts and if so, can one summon them or do they simply occur? What if the idea's a ghost story to begin? If haunts are homes away from home, whose haunt/house is a haunted house? Do recurring nightmares recapture magic? See jas0n, like Friday the 13th on USA. Remember, the person who said, "Bad luck isn't brought by broken mirrors, but by broken minds," was a figment of someone's imagination. Regret and resolve both speak in a still small voice.

Lenzmen - Bend and Blur Your Optics

What of science-fiction when both science and fiction fall victim to tyrannical repression? Some may see in fascism's rise a boon for dystopian writings. For that, a friendly reminder and fair warning: tech bros who once read seminal cyberpunk as prescriptive look at Afrofuturism with the same lens and see in it horror stories. So, Bend and Blur Your Optics. The Lenzmen are an Atoms Family adjacent rap group borne from the same radio station that gave the world Public Enemy. The individual and collective output of their members Dynamics Plus, Dokta Strange, Centri, and Earthadox is a universe that exists both unto itself and intertwined with the last 30-odd years of underground rap and digital comics. 

On the occasion of this ground zero album work's 2010 reissue, Dynamics Plus wrote, "There’s a constant switch between cringing and being awed to the point of feeling intimidated." Of their individual lenses he recalled, "The sights came from my tendency to always dream about the future (foresight), Doc Strange was concerned with today and right now (insight) and Earthadox was always saying remember when (hindsight). Centri was always coming with some off-the-wall observation so we called him Outer-Sight and it stuck."

More missives to follow as time's destruction permits.