Long, Hot Summer Update
First up, the Madison heavyweight hip hop live band dumate has been having an amazing year, and to celebrate, they’re offering their full length album, We Have the Technology, for free through Bandcamp. Click here to get yours. This is a limited time offer deal.
The dumate team has been very, very busy this year… especially MPC player / producer Man Mantis. He’s dropped an experimentally awesome EP’s with J. Dante, Whole New World, and a classic-flavored EP with dumate emcee D.L.O. the Iceman titled The IceMantis EP, which has been getting great reviews.
I mean, really great reviews. The Onion’s A/V Club gave it an “A” rating, concluding that the dumate crew was “grotesquely underrated on both a local and national scale.” Amen.
Up next, Man Mantis is working on an instrumental release, Cities Without Houses. Based on what I’ve heard, I think it’s going to make some serious noise for him… stay tuned.
We’ve got a lot of extremely dope producers on the World Around roster. This year has seen incredible releases from nearly all of them. First we dropped Naturetone‘s debut, Nihon, an ambitious and exotic tribute to the music and culture of Japan. Naturetone was fortunate enough to make a pilgrimage there this year… and he got married this year, too!
Then came Dr. Quandary‘s magnum opus, Beyond All Spheres of Force and Matter. It’s been a trip watching this release ripple through Teh Internets — we see a new review or evangelical blog post at least once a week. This is a monumental release with a strange dispersion pattern… from Los Angeles to Paris to Tokyo, it’s some universal space music that’s still finding new fans every day.
Most recently, our resident philosophical terrorist Louis Mackey dropped an instrumental EP that’s got people flipping out, known as Destroyer of All Things. As I write this, Lou is about 28,000 feet above the ground. He’s flying out to Boston to establish World Around’s Eastern headquarters with Dr. Quandary. Expect to hear a lot of amazing music coming from that compound, starting with The Dioscuri EP, a Mackey/Quandary collaboration that will probably go down in history as the only hip hop album entirely devoted to Greek and Roman history, culture and literature. Trust me — it’s even weirder and more complex than it sounds, and it will be worth the wait.
Finally, I’d like to address a few of the most common questions we get in the inbox these days…
1. What about DAIMYO!?? I have great news: not only is Daimyo back on the scene, he’s become even more of a beast in the meantime, expanding his horizons to jazz fusion and dubstep electronica. The material he’s been sending lately has been nothing short of face-melting. Expect to start hearing a lot from him before 2010 is through…
2. Where did Adam Kadmon go?? I have no answer for that, but I can tell you that we’ll be releasing another EP, assembled by Louis Mackey, of new Kadmon material. Kadmon is a real-deal mystery mammal, though, and I can’t tell you much more than this.
3. What about that Thirtyseven / Algorhythms / Humpasaur Jones??
Well, that’s a whole other essay that should probably be written by someone else. There’s going to be a lot more announcements in August, and a lot more music, too… as always, thank you for reading, thank you for reaching out, and most of all, thank you for listening.
