Its been a while since a song made me laugh out loud. Thankfully, The Deli Boys dropped me their track PR Girls, Inspired by the chicks in public relations that they know.
Is it reinforcing the stereotype of PR girls as nothing more than dumb, gold-digging sluts that are into lattes, brunch and fashion? Definitely. But that’s what makes it good.
From their blog post about the track:
“It talks about the large boot, small dog, fancy bag culture that has taken over the city streets across our nation. We recognized a type of girl that was repeatedly emerging from the deep jungles of urban culture. Owning the street with their over-priced bags, they developed their own language of terms by using weird melodic lisps and slurs. These women, no matter if they were in the Public Relations field or not, were dubbed “PR Girls”. This term catapulted the idea of writing and producing this song. We hopes you like.”
If you’ve been in Toronto for the past years, you’ve probably noticed that the city has some serious electronic talent.
Part of that talent includes some of the city’s finest music blogs:
Salacious Sound posts some great party tracks on a very regular basis, and they’re often the first place I read about tours coming to Toronto. A recent post they wrote stakes the claim that Toronto might just be the Remix Capital of the World, and I think the might just be right.
Here’s a couple of choice tracks from Toronto artists they posted recently:
As a bonus, their History of Electro series kicked off the other day, and promises to be a great series of posts.
Pugged Not Thugged is a blog that I’ve only been reading for a few weeks now, but I already like it a lot, especially the fact that there were the first place I heard the O-God Ducksauce remix:
ElectroTO is like a shrine to the city’s finest electro. In their “What’s Good Wednesday,” posts the blog’s writers Trackson and The Vamp give everyone a good heads up on the city’s best parties. The image at the top of this post comes from them (thanks, guys), and is one of the better redesigns of the Jay’s logo that I’ve ever seen. Close seconds are the one where the Blue Jay looks like an uzi and one I’ve seen of the Blue Jay wearing headphones.
Plus, ElectroTO has some wicked t-shirts available for sale.
Torontette has been blogging her little heart out for the past couple of months and while her tunes of choice aren’t always the pumping electro I prefer, she’s still got a feel for the city.
I especially like the Van Schie tracks she had up recently:
Finally, this blog post is dedicated to the memory of The Curb Crawlers - the first music blog I started reading (single tear rolling down my cheek) and despite having folded up shop, still one of the internet’s finest pieces of HTML and CSS.
What are your favorite T-dots artists or blogs? Hook me up with some new stuff to listen to.
The Panther Moderns were a sort of youth terrorism organization in the book Neuromancer by William Gibson:
“Panther Moderns,” he said to the Hosaka, removing the trodes. “Five minute precis.”
“Ready,” the computer said.
It wasn’t a name he knew. Something new, something that had come in since he’d
been in Chiba. Fads swept the youth of the Sprawl at the speed of light; entire subcultures
could rise overnight, thrive for a dozen weeks, and then vanish utterly. “Go,” he said. The
Hosaka had accessed its array of libraries, journals, and news services.
The precis began with a long hold on a color still that Case at first assumed was a
collage of some kind, a boy’s face snipped from another image and glued to a photograph
of a paint-scrawled wall. Dark eyes, epicanthic folds obviously the result of surgery, an
angry dusting of acne across pale narrow cheeks. The Hosaka released the freeze; the boy
moved, flowing with the sinister grace of a mime pretending to be a jungle predator. His
body was nearly invisible, an abstract pattern approximating the scribbled brickwork
sliding smoothly across his tight one piece. Mimetic polycarbon.
Cut to Dr. Virginia Rambali, Sociology, NYU, her name, faculty, and school pulsing
across the screen in pink alphanumerics.
“Given their penchant for these random acts of surreal violence,” someone said, “it
may be difficult for our viewers to understand why you continue to insist that this
phenomenon isn’t a form of terrorism.”
Dr. Rambali smiled. “There is always a point at which the terrorist ceases to
manipulate the media gestalt. A point at which the violence may well escalate, but beyond
which the terrorist has become symptomatic of the media gestalt itself. Terrorism as we
ordinarily understand it is inately media-related. The Panther Moderns differ from other
terrorists precisely in their degree of self-consciousness, in their awareness of the extent
to which media divorce the act of terrorism from the original sociopolitical intent….”
In the book, the “random acts of surreal violence” described above take the form of the Panther Moderns facilitating a raid on an office building by hacking into the building’s computer network to basically hypnotize everyone inside into thinking they’ve been poisoned. At the same time, some of the Moderns called the police to tell them that:
“an obscure sub sect of militant Christian fundamentalists had just taken credit for having introduced clinical levels of an outlawed psychoactive agent known as Blue Nine into the ventilation system of the Sense/Net Pyramid. Blue Nine, known in California as Grievous Angel, had been shown to produce acute paranoia and homicidal psychosis in eighty-five percent of experimental subjects.”
Throughout the raid, the Panther Moderns refer to themselves as ‘Brood’ and another character as Cat Mother.
Since Neuromancer is pretty 80s, here are some synthed-out tracks to get you thinking about the original cyberpunks:
Part of me wants to think that those tracks are what the Panther Moderns would be jamming to if they were actually around today. A bigger part of me knows that they’d probably be fucking around on 4chan instead.
If you like this playlist, you might also like the Space Dub playlist I put together (smiliarly inspired by Neuromancer), or the mix I think Thanos would have given Death.
I used to be really into designing t-shirts. I’d spend a morning sketching the design then (lacking a scanner), I’d take a picture with a digital camera and edit the image in photo shop. Next, I’d print it out on thick paper, cut that into a stencil and paint it onto shirts with a roller brush. It was a pretty labor intensive process, and some of those designs never actually made it into shirt form.
Fortunately, my girl got one actually printed on a shirt for me after snagging the design off of an earlier post I wrote (that’s her sexy ass modeling it above).
Expect more t-shirt designs, both new and from the archives here soon on 199X.
I’ve been a big fan of The Girls Can Hear Us ever since Audioporn mentioned that they sound like another of my favorite artists, Scotty Dynamo.
The Girls Can Hears Us! (conveniently shorted as TGCHU) have the sort of self-aware hilarity that I like in my electropop-rap, and the catchy beats also make for pretty good gym music.
Now, just in time for summer, TGCHU are going to drop their debut album and all of the songs sound pretty good. Even better is that the boys are fans of giving some of their tracks away for free, and hooked me up with a couple for posting here.
To stay posted on when their album comes out, hit up TGCHU.com. Bide your time until then with a couple of other TGCHU tracks I’ve posted here and here.
As I Tweeted earlier, this trailer for The Electro Wars (a documentary about electronic music) has me absolutely stoked about the state of music today. From the film’s decription:
“It seems that every other day a new remix is popping up on the blogosphere, how does this affect marketing for other independent artists? Do they welcome the remixes or oppose them? Is music overload possible? What will eventually happen when all these budding producers grab a hold of a Pro Tools tutorial and develop their own remixes week in and week out? Will the remix itself become obsolete? Will original tracks have to step up to the forefront rather than recede into the background? Themes of this nature are explored in the film.”
The trailer seems to answer most of these questions, and all the artists interviewed seem to agree that it doesn’t matter what category music is in anymore, and that it is all amazing and all in one stream, and that there is a place for everything.
It has been a while since I last heard from NONEWYORK, and that’s why I was so excited when they sent me an email the other day with a couple of new tracks.
Born in Blood is a slower track from what I think they normally do. Its dark and full to the brim with dub and samples from Dexter.
Their refix of Rusko’s Cali Anthem is also a solid track, and the Tupac sample really cements the California feel. In fact, it even inspired me to add a California category to this blog.
The NONEWYORK boys are featured on Bay Area Bass Vol 1 and you can grab the whole thing here. They are also NONEWYORK_BASS on Twitter, and they’ve also got some mean bass on their MySpace page.
You can also find a couple of other tracks by them on 199X here and here.
The image above is from the The Descent, probably one of my favorite horror movies. Its full of blood and claustrophobic terror.
Its the beginning of March here in Toronto (actually, its probably the beginning of March in the whole world) and the weather is unseasonably warm. To celebrate, I ate lunch on a patio.
Is this the beginning of summer? I hope so, and to get in the mood I’ve been listening to these smart Beach Boys remixes.
It’s not everyday that a Chicago DJ emails you to tell you that your write-up on Juke was great and that he’s stoked that the music he loves has reached such a global level:
“I think that juke will not end up like a flash in the pan style of music since there is a huge culture that is tied in with it (foot working, Midwest Loyalty, etc)…nothing is more diversifying and mass appealing as Juke music, its all about the rhythm and booty shakin’, and lets face it, fotworkin’ is exciting to watch!”
I don’t really know what he’s on about “midwest loyalty, but his name is STARFOXXX, and he also dropped me some choice Juke cuts. Check ‘em below and file them under Partying All The Time:
