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Author & Punisher

Wow.

“After leaving a career as a mechanical engineer in Boston to focus on art and sculpture, Tristan Shone, the creator and sole artist behind AUTHOR & PUNISHER, moved west to pursue his MFA in Southern California. In the metal and machine shops of University of California, San Diego, Shone forged a relationship with design, sound and fabrication that ultimately yielded AUTHOR & PUNISHER‘s first music and mapped the journey away from traditional instrumentation towards custom made, precision machinery.

Shone used his technical knowledge, along with his artistic background to create what Wired Magazine has hailed as his own “special brand of doom metal.” All aspects of the AUTHOR & PUNISHER sound begin with physical movement, limbs struggling in unison to coordinate a wall of electronic rhythm and oscillation, ultimately conditioned by an organic and loose quality absent of plastic perfection. AUTHOR & PUNISHER performances are a real amalgamation between man and mechanisms. They are direct, physical, heavy experiences that have amassed praise and intrigue from a wide array of audiences”

More: tristanshone.com

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Clipping


“…There Existed An Addiction to Blood is Clipping’s response to the horrorcore hip-hop of Brotha Lynch Hung and early Three 6 Mafia, which they’ve always loved and knew they wanted to pay homage to. But also, as horror film and literature lifers, their long-awaited opportunity to make a musical anthology of horror stories in the vein of the blaxploitation flicks of the 1970s—which they view as distinctly political, as Clipping has always been. The title of the album is taken from the 1973 film Ganja & Hess, an avant-garde horror film about black vampires that’s sampled in the centerpiece of the album, “Blood of the Fang.” 

“It’s a lot of things I’m attracted to and interested in in noise, and metal, and extreme music,” Hutson says. “Which is, like, a very vocal hard-left, anti-racist politics. But that’s handled kind of irresponsibly and violently, in a way that would be frowned upon by non-anarchists, I guess.” 

More: Yesplz


“The “Blood of the Fang” visual is inspired by a photo of Huey Newton — co-founder of The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense — hand-cuffed to a hospital gurney while being treated for a gunshot wound in the abdomen after a gun battle with Oakland police in October 1967.
 
[…] Daveed Diggs’s lyrics conjure an alternate history of black political struggle in the 1960s and 70s, name-dropping radical activists and reimagining them as a pantheon of undead superheroes fighting against systems of oppression.”

More: Subpop

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Lim Kim – 민족요

“…listeners expecting the singer to return to that brand of quirky synth-pop, or anything else else she previously explored, are in for a shock with the 25-year-old’s latest release, Generasian, a powerful, subversive reintroduction — and perhaps her truest introduction yet, to Kim.

Now doing her own thing as an independent artist, Lim Kim (Kim Ye-rim)’s new music is empowering as it is impactful, and it’s her explicit response to being placed in what she describes as a figurative box that she felt trapped in during the early days of her career.

[…] the impactful, genre-hopping Generasian in October. A declaration of her return (and a shift towards English-language music), it was a dramatic move, and one that was an expression of her identity as a Korean woman dealing with her place in the world at large. “I need to change up this game/ Don’t identify self in the male gaze/ I’m raising my voice to be heard/ Building my world,” she proclaims on “Sal-Ki.” “Decolonize from weakness/ Overpower their system,” she later says.

[…]
“Minjokyo,” which incorporates the Korean word usually used for ”nation” or ”people.” She’s inspired by Korean shamanism, which has traditionally incorporated singing and dancing into rituals, and sees herself as a modern day priestess of sorts. “I felt like Korean people have this energy with entertainment,” she says. “So I started thinking about making music about those spirits and rituals, and that was the basis of ‘Minjokyo.’ The reason it’s split into two tracks is that when you do that ritual you kind of enter that ritual and you start to sing and dance to go to the next phase, the new world, I guess.”

More @ Billboard

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Moon Tooth – Musketeers & Queen Wolf

Unique vocals, I dig. “…disparate musical impulses crammed together in breathlessly intense, often dizzyingly off-the-wall songs that somehow cohere and lodge in the brain like pop earworms. Eleven of those make up the quartet’s 2019 album Crux, simultaneously the year’s most exhilarating and heart-wrenching heavy-rock album. In a time when metal is hopelessly subdivided, Moon Tooth cherry-pick from the genre’s entire spectrum, variously evoking Van Halen flash, Converge catharsis, Deftones soul, Mastodon intricacy, and Meshuggah heft. There’s something in each track on the album to piss off every purist — or delight any headbanger who’s grown weary of picking sides.”
More at Rolling Stone

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J Dilla – Take Notice feat Guilty Simpson

“Icy, unadorned space is broken up with grim organ bits on “Take Notice,” which appeared on Dilla’s Ruff Draft, originally a German-only vinyl EP in 2003 before Stones Throw issued it in its current extended version. The satisfying mixed bag on Ruff Draft was originally developed for a windows-down-low, ride-around-in-the-summer car stereo cassette tape experience. It’s almost all Dilla — “Take Notice” is the only Ruff Draft entry that features a guest emcee.”

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