Blog: 33/45

Why is Missy Elliott the unofficial mash-up queen? Every new single of hers in the past three years has spawned version after version, some of them fun, most of them awful. I guess it's all Richard X's fault -- the original Girls on Top records (including "Warm Bitch," i.e. "She's a Bitch" over the Normals' "Warm Leatherette") were so great that imitators can't stop trying to remake them, with increasingly diminishing returns. When I grabbed this 12" I thought it was a legit house remix of Missy's "Lose Control," but it turns out it's a mash [...]

Making mixes is my favorite hobby. Every month (or so) I'm planning to post up an hour-long mix broken into three 20-minute files. This first one I did over the summer to give to friends, basically trying to smoosh a bunch of post-punk, hip-hop and old-school electronic bizness into one big ball. At the time I was really feeling Tim Sweeney's RVNG MX3 and the way it jumped from Tones on Tail to Radiohead to Grace Jones while still keeping the same groove, so I wanted to throw in as many genres as possible. [...]

Turntablelab has been killing it lately with the mutant disco, it's like a new Cloud One reissue pops up there every two days. This new 12" on Rong that I picked up there last week is from 2005, not 1979, but it sure sounds like something Metro Area found under Patrick Adams' couch cushions. Lee Douglas - "Our Song"

So, Tortoise and Bonnie "Prince" Billy walk into a bar ... It almost sounds like a punchline, that these guys got together to record an album of cover songs including Elton John's "Daniel" and Springsteen's "Thunder Road." (It's called The Bold and the Brave , supposedly due out in January.) But damn, this cover of Devo is pretty good. The original is super-stiff discoid minimalism; the new version sounds like they got the song drunk and made Bonnie Prince sing into an echoplex. Chicago-Louisville axis 4eva. Devo - "That's Pep!" [...]

Hey, is this thing on Check, one two Liftoff.