Travis Egedy’s last Pictureplane album, Thee Physical, was a crowded concoction of garish rave signifiers, dance music clichés, and the punk-inspired free-for-all collage aesthetic of his earlier work weighted with lyrical conceits surrounding gender identity. With beefier production values that pointed more directly toward trance and euphoric house, it was undoubtedly the most complete and confident thing the Denver producer’s created to date. But never a stranger to the internet, Egedy’s free download series, Dimensional Rip, has played host to a handful of jumbled, messy mixes, and the seventh installment is a full-blown Thee Physical remix album.

Well, sort of: It depends on how you define “album.” Only five of Thee Physical‘s 11 originals are given the remix treatment, and they’re plopped down as an unordered clump of beats. I’m not sure how we’re supposed to listen to this; on my mp3 player, they’re sorted alphabetically, meaning three remixes of “Body Mod” are followed by a whopping seven reworks of lead single “Post Physical”– it’s not the most measured playlist I’ve ever heard. In my iTunes, however, the tracks are assorted seemingly randomly, splitting up the monotony but throwing in a whole lot of volatile randomness. So as much as we might want to call Dimensional Rip 7 an album, in practice it’s merely a collection of tracks for us to peruse and choose from.

Even though the production values of Thee Physical seemed to pull Egedy away from the kind of homemade dance music made from big obvious samples (such as 2009′s memorable “Goth Star”), its remix companion hands the album over to a whole spectrum of DIY denizens, from recognizable to obscure names. The results vary in quality just as much. For as many that simply aren’t distinctive, there’s a number of cringe-worthy facepalms. Chicago’s Fire For Effect seize on the slow, belaboured theatricality of “Post Physical”, turning it into something saccharine and overblown, while the less said about Craxxxmurf’s headache-inducing take on “Touching Transform” the better. Dimensional Rip 7‘s sheer size has one advantage, however: For every misstep there’s a good remix lurking behind it. Ritualz’s “Alien Trance remix” of “Post Physical” takes hold of the trance thread that weaves through Egedy’s work and turns it rubbery and warped, while Adeptus lay down a bed of lush synths and acid gurgles, turning “Trancegender” into the aching duet with Zola Jesus it should have been in the first place.

Dimensional Rip 7 features some prominent and well-timed guests, too. Montreal woman-of-the-moment Grimes dismantles “Real Is a Feeling” and reconstructs it into one of her own pins-and-needles skeletons, infusing the track with her breathy coos for a remix so delicate it almost sounds out of place on a package full of speaker-blown hymns to homemade dance music. But the crown jewel undoubtedly belongs to makeshift chop’n'screw master Physical Therapy. The New Jersey producer’s own distinct style– taking huge samples and inflating them until they’re puffy clouds of distortion and then drenching everything in sad, defeated, lean-dripping slowdown– is more than compatible with Pictureplane’s, and his take on “Post Physical” layers sirens, heavy metallic breaks, and the original’s stirring synth riff. It’s one of the collection’s few moments that feels truly innovative, one of the American underground’s weirdest personalities putting his imprint on another bizarro underdog.

That inspiring collaboration sits atop a veritable heap of information-overload excess, and a project as cheeky but quietly ambitious as Pictureplane deserves nothing less than a sprawling song-vomit remix album. Like most of what he does, it’s far from tasteful and not always all that great, but the highlights are some of the most fun and carefree electronic music from this side of the Atlantic. There’s been a lot of talk about the American “new rave generation” fueled by artists like Skrillex and Deadmau5, but it’s really Pictureplane that embodies everything caricatured in images of those neon-clad teenagers. Honestly, Dimensional Rip 7 is a complete mess and not even close to a coherent listening experience, but its highs are high enough to make wading through the mud a worthwhile endeavor.

Source: Pitchfork: Album Reviews

Jimmy Castor, band leader of the Jimmy Castor Bunch, died Monday (Jan. 16) in Las Vegas. The cause of death of the 64 year old is “currently unknown,” according to Prefix Magazine.

Castor  started as a doo-wop singer before transitioning into a disco funk saxophonist in the early 60s. In 1972, Jimmy Castor formed the Jimmy Castor Bunch, consisting keyboardist/trumpeter Gerry Thomas, bassist Doug Gibson, guitarist Harry Jensen, conga player Lenny Fridle Jr., and drummer Bobby Manigault.

Soon after signing to RCA, the Jimmy Castor Bunch delivered several consecutive hits, one being “Troglodyte (Cave Man).”  “Troglodyte (Cave Man)” was Castor’s biggest Hot 100 hit, reaching No. 6 in 1972. A slew of our favorite artists have sampled Castor’s top ten hit: Christina Aguilera (“Back in the Day”), N.W.A. (“Gangsta Gangsta,” “The Dawyz of Wayback”), Blackstreet (“Don’t Leave Me”), Wu-Tang Clan (“Wu  Banga” (Remix), Madonna (“Into the Groove 2008″) and more.

Most recently, Kanye West sampled Castor’s “I Just Wanna Stop” on “We Don’t Care,” off his freshman album, “The College Dropout.”

Source: Billboard.com

Brad Oberhofer‘s emotional, ramshackle pop first caught our attention with 2010′s “Away Frm U”. He’s since signed a deal with the Glassnote label, home to the likes of Phoenix and Kele, where he’ll release his debut full-length Time Capsule II on March 27. Oberhofer hones his formula on the album’s grandiose opening track, “HEART”, which makes use of some sparkling keys and orchestral strings. Check it out below:

MP3: Oberhofer: “HEART”

Source: Pitchfork: The Playlist

Juicy J cuts to the chase early on Blue Dream Lean: The entire chorus of “Juicy J Can’t”, the album’s third track, is, “You say no to drugs/ Juicy J can’t.” It’s informative, though not completely necessary on a mixtape that derives its title by rhyming the slang for cough syrup and soda with the name of a strand of weed. Juicy– one half of legendary, and legendarily bizarre, Memphis rap group Three 6 Mafia– seemingly spent most of 2011 ingesting enough recreational drugs to make Nikki Sixx raise an eyebrow, and paying producer Lex Luger for beats so he can rap about it. Blue Dream Lean is basically a continuation of Juicy’s two collaborative mixtapes with Luger, Rubber Band Business and Rubber Band Business 2. Despite Luger’s producing only nine of the album’s 28 tracks, beats by Sonny Digital and Juicy himself work off of Luger’s blueprint, which itself is partially filtered down from the type of dark, head-knocking production of classic Three 6.

The success and failure of the mixtape are two sides of the same coin. On the one hand, there’s cohesion to Blue Dream Lean that serves it well. The result of Juicy’s chanting about taking drugs over tracks that are largely similar is that he pulls you into his world, one where narcotics blur everything together until one day you have a 28-track mixtape, yet you still need to title every song, but you’re so stoned that you just pick the dominant line from every chorus. Lesser artists have tried much harder to achieve the same effect and failed, and Juicy pulls it off effortlessly. The flip side of that, of course, is that a 28-track mixtape featuring Juicy J chanting over largely similar beats is far too many tracks, especially on the heels of two related tapes. Blue Dream Lean could be chopped in half and be no worse for the wear, but that’s par for the course.

It’s a shame, too, because a combination of the best Luger-style tracks and the few songs that go in a different direction would make for a very good album. The opening quarter of the mixtape is especially inspired, as it finds Juicy at the point where he’s most concentrated on casually, almost mindlessly, talking shit. Interspersed throughout the album are songs like “Big Bank”(produced by Drumma Boy, one of the most diverse producers in the South) and “Stoners Night 2″, which break up the slight monotony but deserve to be highlighted even further. The latter, done by notable up-and-coming producer Harry Fraud, features a lush, soulful sample that’s a breath of fresh air amongst the album’s suffocating palette.

The latter part of the tape gives shine to blog favorites like A$AP Rocky, Spaceghostpurrp, Alley Boy, and Kreayshawn, all of whom sound much too eager to please. And though that’s perfectly understandable, it’s quite jarring considering that Juicy is trading in his ability to make the listener believe that he’s self-destructively destroying his body regardless of the consequences. Kreayshawn at least managed to score the best chorus, and she and Juicy repeatedly asking each other, “you trippy, mane?” is the only time any of the aforementioned guests come off as carefree enough to hit on the album’s vibe.

Blue Dream Lean is allegedly Juicy’s first offering as a member of Wiz Khalifa‘s Taylor Gang, and though hot new rappers using their newfound power to sign legendary veterans that have faded from the spotlight almost always leads to a failure to meet inflated expectations, there’s enough here to suggest that Juicy could put out a really good album with the input of a dedicated editor.

Source: Pitchfork: Album Reviews

Glitch is one of those microgenres that seemed to disappear halfway through the last decade. When the German outfit Oval– early on reduced to founding member Markus Popp– made its return in 2010 with O, it was hard to decide how to react. Especially since O was one of its most difficult and fussy efforts yet, and largely divorced from Oval’s previously established and instantly recognizable aesthetic as heard on landmarks like 94 Diskont and Ovalcommers. With a palette based on the sound of live instruments, O lacked some of the algorithmic wizardry of Popp’s best work and was a fatiguingly lengthy listen either way. You’d be forgiven for thinking that OvalDNA, coming just a year later and clocking in with another 25 tracks– and this after the complementary 15-track 12″ Oh– is something like overkill.

Here’s the surprise: OvalDNA is actually a collection of bits and bytes from assorted Oval eras past. The even bigger surprise? While it indeed sounds like the old Oval we know and love, there’s nothing even remotely scatterbrained or assorted about this one. Not only is OvalDNA remarkably consistent and thematically sound, it’s so well-sequenced that its 25 tracks fly by in a glorious, easygoing blur, a far cry from that fatal fragmentation that ate away at O. Its variety renders these sounds in a fluid and volatile technicolor missing from even early records like Systemisch. In a way, it’s the best of both Oval worlds.  Included in the package is a DVD with ten bonus tracks, a music video, a documentary, and 2000 AIFF files of sounds and elements from the entirety of Popp’s musical output “intended for music producers.”  Okay, so maybe it’s a little overkill, but coming from an artist who made a public installation inviting people to render their own interpretations of his work (as part of 2000′s Ovalprocess), it shouldn’t really come as a surprise either.

Like so much of this music, sometimes it’s hard to tell whether or not the decay and destruction that pries apart the layers is accidental or planned, but here the manipulation feels effortless, executed with a smart and steady hand. There are many varieties of Oval on offer, though it’s most often a warm-hued, even honeyed sound palette rather than the acerbic distortion of, say, Ovalcommers. While some tracks like “Savvy” do focus on harsher, more challenging sounds, even these– or the hushed, rushed thermal swooshing of “70 Kino” and its choked string section– feel oddly accommodating. OvalDNA doesn’t dip into the same well of asceticism as the conceptually driven sound-design experiments you’ll find on labels like Mille Plateaux or Raster-Noton; instead, each stutter and skip feels melodically driven, each sample caught and clipped mid-moment like a key to some larger world of musical delights that we’re given glimpses of but are never actually led to– dig the teases at jungle on “Mare Fax”– on account of the album’s sprightly pace.

Even if it can be a tease, some moments on OvalDNA are downright welcoming: It’s hard to think of anything from Oval since the legendary “Do While” as beautiful as “Australasia”. One of the album’s more compositionally complete tracks, it juggles jerkily plucked strings, organs that whir to life before being pulled apart into groaning rumbles, and drums that stutter across the stereo spectrum at random. That might sound like a mess, but the elements just slightly coalesce to form a stirring, heart-tugging refrain gently morphing over the track’s three-and-a-half minutes, a chief example of the accidental alchemy of OvalDNA. “Octaeder 0.2″, which formed the centerpiece to Oval’s live contribution to the Henri Pousseur tribute 4 Parabolic Mixes, proves the emotional potential of these flurries of compressed ones and zeroes, while the more recent Oval material is at least coincidentally referenced with a number of tracks that make live-instrument samples their focus (“Credit Line”), stumbling on an odd hybrid of acoustic and computerized sounds in the process, like twang rendered with right angles.

Approachability is one thing, and OvalDNA has it in spades, but there’s also the issue of relevance: Can a veteran act in a largely outmoded genre still command attention with an outtakes collection? Certainly, any fan of Oval (particularly those lapsed after O) will find a lot to love in OvalDNA‘s gentle reassurances, but even for a newcomer, these sounds are idiosyncratic and stimulating enough to get lost in. OvalDNA is curiously timeless, as if these tracks were encased in amber, still holding that intriguingly alien gleam and shine as back in Oval’s halcyon days, even polished up a little nicer this time. It might not be something we knew we still needed, but at the least, OvalDNA is a solid addition to the canon of one of the most innovative electronic acts of the 1990s.

Source: Pitchfork: Best New Reissues

A highlight during this weekend’s “Saturday Night Live” was a sketch titled “You Can Do Anything,” a faux talk show “celebrating the incredibly high self-esteem of the YouTube generation.” The evening’s host, Daniel Radcliffe, played a guy who posted a video online and “therefore assumes everyone knows my name and admires my work.”

Minutes later Lana Del Rey, a sultry voiced singer who has essentially made her name on two songs and their YouTube videos, made her much-anticipated network debut as the show’s musical guest. A bit of writers room fun? Who knows, but regardless Del Rey’s viral-centric fame is changing with the upcoming release of her debut album on Interscope, “Born to Die,” along with a slew of TV appearances and magazine covers (including Billboard’s Best Bets issue).

First, Del Rey needed to get through an appearance on a show that affords its guests no do-overs or edits (ask Ashlee Simpson about overdubs). Looking nervous in her shimmering evening gown and with a full band behind her, Del Rey first soldiered (and twirled) her way through the haunting hit “Video Games.”

With less than ten minutes left until the end of the show, Del Rey and her band emerged again to perform her other well-known track, “Blue Jean.” Again, the understandable nerves:

What did you think of Lana Del Rey’s “SNL” performance? Sound off in the comments.

Source: Billboard.com

Australian post-rock gods Dirty Three return with a new album, Toward the Low Sun, on February 28. It’s the band’s debut for Drag City, and their first record since Cinder was released seven years ago on Touch Go. (Although the band’s 2000 album Whatever You Love, You Are was reissued on the Playbutton format last year.) In the time since their last album, members Jim White, Warren Ellis, and Mick Turner have played with the likes of Nick Cave, PJ Harvey, Cat Power, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Bill Callahan and others. Below, Listen to the track “Rising Below”, via Drag City.

MP3: Dirty Three: “Rising Below”