Available on: UNO NYC

Mykki Blanco’s short career has been marked by defied expectations and confounded audiences. In just over a year, Michael Quattlebaum Jr.’s art-rap alias has released an industrial/noise/poetry EP, an underground-embracing, party-rap mixtape, and now, with Betty Rubble: The Initiation, an even more evolved, personal sound. If you’re looking for a mission statement, look no further than lead cut ‘Angggry Byrdz’: “The people want something new / No fear y’all, I got you.”

Over eight tracks and thirty minutes, the only constant is Mykki Blanco herself: equal parts glam and grime, Blanco is just as likely to fight you as she is to fuck you, with the bluster of both a street rap MC and a vogue house commentator. Her style follows from that singular character, as her flow alternates between poetic free verse and battle-ready punchline rap, often in the same song. Musically, Blanco has teamed with producers whose tracks organically draw from hip-hop and dance music traditions; the last year has proven that these boundaries aren’t just disappearing — they’re already gone.

Sonically, Betty Rubble is as brash as its main character. ‘David Blaine Bitches’ is all squealing, jerking swagger, ‘Crisp Clean’ is a pneumatic rumbler, ‘Bugged Out’ is hazy and anxious (due in large part to a beat by Supreme Cuts), and so on. Meanwhile, the straight-up rap tracks that dominated the Cosmic Angel: The Illuminati Prince/ss mixtape have a single representative, ‘Feeling Special’. The track distills Mykki’s essense into something that is (comparatively) easy to swallow, as she bellows commands (“follow me down the rabbit hole”), spits her finest venom (“Who got the Summer’s Eve / I’m ‘bout to douche these bitches / make you a punchline in my joke / Lenny Bruce you, nigga”), and rides a deceptively complex take on snap rap (with Matrixxman playing DJ Mustard).

Unsurprisingly, the EP takes more unexpected turns than Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. ‘The Initiation’, which begins with the DMX-like pronouncement “Hell is chilly motherfucker,” finds Mykki chanting in Latin over a paranoid, siren-heavy Sinden soundscape. “Carpe noctem / carpe diem / Deo confidimus” (“seize the night / seize the day / In God we trust”) is a hypnotic leitmotif that makes the song feel like a séance, and while it’s well suited to Mykki’s dramatic, performance-art live shows, I can’t help but feeling that it would have made a stronger opening track. Later on, just when the listener has adjusted to the darkly tweaked beats and off-kilter rap of Betty Rubble, Blanco drops a ’90s throwback in the form of ‘Ace Bougie Chick’: while it’s complete with jazzy piano fills, a two-stepping groove, and a soulful chorus, this tale of down-low love is far from conventional.

In the style of Mykki’s Matrixxman collaboration ‘God Created The Beat’, Betty Rubble closes with ‘Vienna’, a spoken-word journey through art, music, and sexuality over a hyper house beat. It sounds like a Michael Alig anecdote if written by Bret Easton Ellis, and considering Mykki Blanco’s burgeoning position in the New York underground, it makes perfect sense. For those that have watched and listened to Mykki Blanco’s hypercharged evolution, Betty Rubble: The Initiation isn’t just a culmination of what she’s done — it’s a sign of what’s to come.

“Tensions were already high when the festival started,” says Hisham Mayet, cofounder of Sublime Frequencies, purveyors of field-recordings, garage jams and radio collages of some of the most far-flung musical traditions in the world.

“Usually the festival is held way outside of Timbuktu, but they had to hold it close to an urban area and surround the whole site with a Malian military garrison.”

Festival au Désert 2012 was at the centre of a brewing geopolitical crisis in northern Mali. Following the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in neighboring Libya, armed Tuareg tribesmen who were loyal to him were arriving into Mali, seeking to carve out their own independent state in the Sahara. Northern Mali was entering a conflict that continues to this day.

Hisham was joined on his trip to Mali by his host Koudede, a singer and guitarist who Sublime Frequencies recorded for the fifth volume of its Guitars from Agadez’series. In Bamako, Mali’s capital, Hisham recorded Koudede for the sixth Guitars from Agadez compilation, producing a record that was to be the musician’s last. He died later that year in a car accident.

Koudede, like Group Inerene and Abdallah Oumbadougou, was a Tuareg, a nomadic and fiercely independent Berber tribe that live in the barren wilderness of northern Mali and Niger, as well as southern Libya. The Tuareg have a long musical history, which is deeply intertwined with, and influenced by, their century-long struggle against French colonialists and the independent African states that followed.
  

  
Common musical themes include lamenting the loss of a traditional mode of life and protesting against exploitation, misrepresentation and inequality – unchecked, environmentally-destructive uranium mining in their homeland is one of their biggest grievances. These protest songs were fuel for the Tuareg rebellion of the 1990s. A crackdown by oppressive governments in Niger and Mali forced many of them into Libyan refugee camps under the protection of the eccentric and often brutal regime of Gaddafi.

The songs were recorded onto cassette tapes using guitars and amplifiers provided by Gaddafi himself, who was fanning expatriate separatist tendencies against his southern neighbors. These cassettes were traded across the Sahara to the guerrilla fighters, some of whom were musicians themselves. It was also in these camps that the tribe embraced the amplified sound that became the ‘third wave’ of the Tuareg sound. Freewheeling rhythm guitars are turned up high and syncopate in and out of step with one another, creating a warm psychedelic groove. Women ululate. It sounds great.

The tension around 2012’s Festival au Désert was the result of the fall of Gaddafi in neighboring Libya, who after 40 years of rule, was ousted by NATO and murdered by rebels. The strongman had been the patron and protector of the Tuareg, who were attempting to establish a state in the vast deserts of northern Mali and Niger. Some elements of the Tuareg were even forming unlikely alliances with Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb to forge out an Islamic Caliphate based upon the medieval Arabian society during the time of Prophet Mohammed. It is perhaps partly for musical reasons that the Tuareg soon rejected the Islamists, who towards the end of 2012 were burning instruments and banning music across northern Mali.

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Following a successful outing in 2012, the Independent Label Market will return to London for another whirlwind of trading, bartering and digging. 

Unlike your regular garden variety record fair, the Independent Label Market invites bosses and high-rankers from a slew of independent labels to sell their goods direct to the public. Previous years have seen the likes of R&S, 4AD, Domino, XL and Warp offering an assortment of new, vintage and rare records.

The fifth London edition of the event will take place on Saturday July 13 at Spitalfield’s Market. Over 50 labels have been confirmed, with more yet to be announced. Posters, audio equipment, screen prints, and other assorted paraphernalia for music enthusiasts will also be available to buy on the ground.

In a new development for the project, the event has been partnered with the East End Live music festival. The new one-dayer will feature performances from Charles Hayward, The Monochrome Set, Toy, East India Youth and more

The initial list of participating labels has been announced, and is included below. Head here for further information.

Participants:
4AD
Angular
Because
Bella Union
Big Dada
Brownswood
Caught By The River
Chess Club
Critical Heights
Dead Oceans
Domino
Fabric
Factory Benelux
Faux Discx
Fierce Panda
Fire
Fortuna Pop!
Full Time Hobby
Gringo
Heavenly
Hingefinger
Hospital Records
Houndstooth
Huntley & Palmers
Jagjaguwar
!K7
Killing Moon Ltd
Laissez Faire Club
Les Disques du Crépuscule
Lex
LoJinx
Mais Um Discos
Matador
Monotreme
Moshi Moshi
Ninja Tune
No Pain In Pop
O Genesis
Phantasy Sound
PIAS
Pink Mist
Proville
R&S
Robot Elephant
Rocket Girl
Secretly Canadian
Song By Toad
Sonic Cathedral
Soul Jazz
Soundway
Strut
Swamp 81
Tough Love
Trilogy Tapes
Upset The Rhythm
WIAIWYA
XL
ZZK Records

If you know Modern Love, you know Miles Whittaker: working as MLZ, Millie, Suum Cuique and half of Demdike Stare, the Manchester producer has been a consistent (and consistently rewarding presence) on the label’s books.

Having recently released Faint Hearted - his first full-length as Miles - Whittaker has quietly snuck out an EP-length companion piece to the record, titled Unsecured. The collection runs to 30 minutes, and features four tracks of windswept ambient and techno.

Where Faint Hearted saw Whittaker trying on an array of hats (the junglist’s cap on ‘Lebensform’; the techno-nerd’s tinfoil helmet on ‘Status Narcissism’; the ambient fan’s flowery coronet on ‘Lorian Dreams’), Unsecured is somewhat more focused in its interests: ‘Blatant Statement’ alloys crunching industrial breakbeat with some Apollo-approved synth pads; ‘Infinite Jest’, meanwhile, offers grit-flecked, greyscale dub.

Unsecured is available on 12″ now, courtesy of Modern Love. If you’ve a hankering for more blasted techno and brooding 4×4, head to our The Essential…Modern Love primer. Demdike Stare, meanwhile, have been busying themselves with their Testpressing series (and becoming undisputed champion’s of FACT Singles Club in the process).

Tracklist:
A1. Blatant Statement
A2. Technocracy
B1. Infinite Jest
B2. Plutocracy

It’s nigh-on-impossible to find anyone with a bad word to say about Spencer Hickman’s sterling reissue imprint Death Waltz Recording Co. 

Their discography is a doozy: in little over 18 months, they’ve put out a string of John Carpenter OSTs (Escape From New York, Halloween I-III, Prince Of Darkness, They Live), not to mention other archival releases from Antoni Maiovvi and Fabio Frizzi. With more discs – including their debut Hammer reissue, Harry Robinson’s Twins Of Evil soundtrack – on the boil, Hickman’s flexed his muscles on a skin-crawling cracker of a mix.

US horror magazine Fangoria have tapped up the label to produce a free-to-download mix. The 45-minute session, available to download below, is a macabre delight, oscillating from ultra-synthetic synth fare in the Howarth mould through acid through Goblin-indebted schlock rock. [via Self-Titled]

To celebrate his 53rd birthday, quondam Smiths warbler Morrissey has taken to his True To You site to launch an excoriating assault on the “pitiless atrocity of foie gras”. 

Congratulations to Prince Charles for banning foie gras from all his functions.

However, unsurprisingly, this most savage and cruel commodity continues to be the favorite “dish” of smiling mother-to-be Kate Muddleton (from whom, in fact, we expect no less.)

Foie gras production is illegal in the UK, yet the ever-so-correct Fortnum and Mason have found suppliers in France who will keep their shelves stocked – possibly with the hope that smiling Kate will wobble in and place an order for her unborn child.

Since Fortnum and Mason are now the only department store in London who are associated with the pitiless atrocity of foie gras, would you please write to them/contact them and exert pressure on them to stop selling such asavage beyond belief “product”.

Fortnum and Mason

181 Piccadilly

London W1A 1ER, England

Twitter: @FortnumandMason

http://www.fortnumandmason.com

thank you!

Interesting to see HRH Prince Charles – yes, he who craves to “appear on the front of the Daily Mail / Dressed in your Mother’s bridal veil?” – get a quiet compliment – not a courtesy extended to the recently deceased Margaret Thatcher.

The TDE crew is the latest to jump on Rocko’s ubiquitous (and controversial) beat.

With Black Hippy set to launch the Good Kid M.A.A.D. City tour tonight in Las Vegas (dates below), Kendrick Lamar and friends jump on Childish Major’s stark, mournful beat. Kendrick has long been rumored to be next in line to remix the track, and he doesn’t disappoint.

Unlike the litany of remixes the song has seen (from A$AP Rocky and Wiz Khalifa, to name a few), Rocko has been totally excised from his own track, even as Future is around to drop one last chorus. Rick Ross, unsurprisingly, is nowhere to be found, and a few verses include nods to Rick’s regrettable lyrics. Listen below; it starts at about 1:18.

Ciara returns with this brand new cut from her forthcoming self-titled LP, and this time she’s brought along some assistance in the shape of Nicki Minaj.

Nicki kicks things off rapping like ‘Starships’ never happened, and it’s refreshing to hear her sounding like she actually gives a crap again, paving the way for an assured rap from Ciara herself. It’s a thick, bouncy club-friendly record that reminds of a certain Mrs. Carter‘s bigger tracks.

‘I’m Out’ is a far cry from the addictive, woozy romance of previous single ‘Body Party‘, but that’s no bad thing and its quality certainly gives us a good sense of what we can expect for the full length when it finally sidles out.

Ciara is due out on July 5 via Epic.

Company promises a legal way to remix without having to go through the traditional sample-clearance process.

First launched last year, Legitmix has announced a new digital storefront and a remix-only search engine dubbed Discovery. Legitmix allows remixers to sell their work, while ensuring that sampled artists get credit and payment, and Discovery aims to aid in that process.

“The traditional sample-clearance process makes it impossible for most remixes to be released legitimately, so the remix community built and underground ‘economy of free,’” the company says in a statement. “Unfortunately, this has led to a feeling that remixes have no value. We believe people will pay for remixes to support remixers and the artist they sampled if given a way to do so.”

Citing Diplo, El-P, and moombahton creator Dave Nada among their supporters, Legitmix calls Discovery a “Google for remixes.” In the browser-based search engine, each remix links to sampled tracks, allowing users to use the original tracks in their own creations; if they don’t have the song, Legitmix sends users to iTunes so that remixees can get paid. The Discovery service is running now on Legitmix’s site.