Ericka Blount Danois – “It’s Tricky” (2010)
An article about trip-hop pioneer Tricky from Wax Poetics magazine, Nov. 2, 2010…
Trip-Hop Troubadour Tricky Returns with Mixed Race
Trip-hop pioneer Tricky is back. But really, to his longtime fans, he never left. When critics were searching for the oppressive beats and dark menace he brought with his 1995 debut, Maxinquaye, true fans knew that to Tricky, life is music and music is experimental. If you’re looking for concepts, or categories, or something linear, you’ve come to the wrong place.
Tricky’s latest album, Mixed Race, is a culmination of ambiguity, pure musicianship, and feeling. It’s full of two-to-three-minute snippets of intensity that you want him to stretch out, but he refuses, unless the feeling strikes him. Which, unfortunately, it doesn’t. He says it’s a visual album, much like cinema.
“[Mixed Race] reminds me of when I first heard Public Enemy — very visual,” Tricky says by telephone from his home in Paris (he recently moved Read the rest of this entry »
Kristen Palm – “ESG”
Not sure of the exact date of this bio on early-80s mimimal funk band ESG, but it comes from the Musician Guide website (www.musicianguide.com) and must have been written sometime after 2002. A very cool band — check them out…
Originally comprised of four sisters and their neighbor, ESG officially became a band in 1978. Seminal in the British and American no-wave scene, the group’s spare funk grooves are largely regarded as some of the most sampled in all of hip-hop. Introduced to a wider audience through a 2000 compilation CD, A South Bronx Story, the group has enjoyed a resurgence and now includes a second generation of Scroggins women, Renee and Valerie Scroggins’s daughters, Chistelle and Nicole.
While officially formed in 1978, ESG informally gathered as musicians well before that date. Sisters Renee, Marie, Valerie, and Deborah Scroggins all began playing together as young girls in their South Bronx housing project. Their mother purchased instruments for them as a means to keep them out of trouble in their rough neighborhood. The girls, whose mother was a singer and whose father was also a musician, exhibited a proclivity for music even before they had instruments in hand, however. “We were beating on pots and pans and those kid folk guitars and things like that,” Renee recalled in the Read the rest of this entry »
Lauri Adverb – “poikilos nomos”
(basesd on the Greek, roughly translated, ‘a shifting code’)
You are an asshole;
I am a bitch.
I write trite poetry
and yr songwriting is insipid.
I am yr Peppermint Patty
who just won’t take a hint
and leave you the fuck
alone.
You are my Chinaski,
drunk, dead-ended
listening to classical music
alone in a small stale room.
We are a thunderstorm Read the rest of this entry »
The Beat Patrol 