It’s been a while since we checked in with two of the most popular faces of contemporary dance music, and it turns out that much is brewing in the Deadmau5 and Skrillex camps. Check out what’s going down after the jump.
Mechanical drum machines, Mixmaster Mike and The Gaslamp Killer getting crazy on the decks… with NAMM still on the brain, there’s no shortage of awesome tech clips coming our way. So without further ado, check those out and more after the jump.
“Nissim” evokes images of smoke-thickened rooms with dusty floors shared by musicians behind both traditional Middle Eastern instruments and the latest digital sampling hardware. Bridging two worlds into its soundscapes, GLK tells us a bit more about it.
Ford Models is normally associated with beautiful and inaccessible types pouting in beautiful and inaccessible clothes, and their YouTube channel of backstage interviews generally follows suit, so this one is especially bizarre, as it’s never really explained how or why The Motherf*cking Gaslamp Killer has been chosen as one of their interview subjects.
Sufism is a mystical sect within Islam, dedicated to the purification of the soul in pursuit of divinity. Stillness lies at its heart—a stillness embodied by the religion’s Whirling Dervishes, or semazens, who spin in place in trance-like worship. (If you’ve ever seen the film ‘Baraka’, you’ve seen them in action.)
The same stillness permeates the core of ‘A Sufi and a Killer’, the debut album from the San Diego-raised rapper GonjaSufi. Produced mainly by the Gaslamp Killer and Mainframe, and featuring one track by Flying Lotus![[a]](http://www.beatportal.com/images/site/misc/wiki_box_a.gif)
, it’s a collection of hazy, psychedelic beats, mined from progressive rock and world music, that cradle Gonjasufi’s voice like a nest of moss and sticks.
GonjaSufi—aka Sumach Valentine—came up rapping with San Diego’s Masters of the Universe, but he doesn’t necessarily sound like a rapper on the record. He’s got a reedy singing voice that slips and cracks, grinding against the music like sandpaper—a bluesy, broken yawl somewhere between Jack White and a desiccated D’Angelo. But you can tell he’s a rapper from the way he uses his voice. Even in conversation, he’s performing—it’s not a showoffy thing, but a means of playing with identities, characters, putting meat on ideas, making words flesh. A surfer and a student of yoga, he channels stillness with every syllable.
