Everytime I’m losing contact with contemporary Hip-Hop it pulls me back in again. After breakdancing like a clown to Old-School Hip-Hop and Electro there was a guy ten years later who gave me a tape with music by A tribe called quest’s “Low end theory” to get me started again. Now Dubstep has done it again, combining Dub, Hip-Hop and Electro, exploding now in many different directions.

Skweee is a new music-genre by itself combining compressed digital Funk, Electro, Hip-Hop and Dubstep with Eighties Disco Flavor. People like Eero Johannes, Daniel Savio and Mesak are only a few among a lot interesting projects from Sweden, Finland und Norway. For a beginners guide, check out my mix from weeks ago or buy the new compilation “International Skweee Vol. 2″ or “Skweee Tooth” as long as it’s available.

I mentioned in this post from a while ago the Vocoder-driven Post-Dubstep by Darkstar and Robot Koch.That’s just the beginning of a real postmodern mishmash of styles and reminiscences. Black Moth Super Rainbow’s front guy Tobacco is trying to push the psychedelic sound of his Indie-Rock band closer to the Dubstep-universe by replacing the drummer with a drum machine. Please be sure to check out the 2007  album “Danedlion Gum” by his band Black Moth Super Rainbow.

After Prefuse 73 and Sixtoo I was kind of bored with experimental, instrumental Hip-Hop and wasn’t expecting anything revolutionary or even interesting happening in near future. After finding out about Madlib, Quasimoto and  J.Dilla I fell in love with Disco Balls by Flying Lotus and discovered they’re people like Hudson Mohawk and the Gaslamp Killer doing their sometimes very psychedelic version of Hip-Hop. William Benjamin Bensussen aka the Motherfucking Gaslamp Killer runs the “Low End Theory Club” (check the podcasts) in Los Angeles and produced the new album ” A sufi and a killer” of Gonja Sufi on Warp.

A high influence on all this new forms of Hip-Hop and Dubstep had certainly Kraftwerk-inspired Old-School-Electro and Minimal Wave. Peanut Butter Wolf is writing on Stones Throw Records about the “Minimal Wave” scene in Europe in the Eighties, I recommend you to listen to the podcast here.

Tonight the BoomBoomBrothers with me and Carsten Cremer starting at Monarch, Kreuzberg at 22:00. Come over and have drink!

Just finished a mix with my favorites in Chiptune inspired Dubstep, Skweee, Wonky, Electro and Digital Dub. 95 minutes of heavy bass and cute robot tunes from Harmonic 313, Disrupt, Darkstar, Flogsta Danshall, Harmönia and Hyperdub. And yeah, I’m still not Mixmaster Mike. Have fun and tell me what you think! (mp3, 110MB)

A huge fan of “The Cramps” collected all the songs that were played before a show or in the bandbus. Lux and Ivy of the Cramps chose obscure vintage Rock’n'Roll, Blues and sleazy listening like the one by Moses Longpiece. He is singing about a big steamroller that ran over his girlfriend, shouting at the end of the track: “I’m under the shower, please slide her under the door!”.

I like almost still videos, it’s like adding an other dimension to a photographic portrait, streching the act of taking a picture in time. “L’Enfer” by Henri-Georges Clouzot is a never finished psychedelic experiment in lighting and movie techniques literally starring a wonderful Romy Schneider. A familiar project is the first officially published DVD by Andy Warhol “13 Most Beautiful… Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests”. You can watch Lou Reed drinking a coke and some girl toothbrushing. Warhol shot around 500 portraits and the original material was around two minutes each and was stretched to five minutes in slow motion. You can buy a limited edition DVD in an LP-shaped set with 13 original Ilford fiber paper photographs for 250 bucks here. Music by Britta Phillips and Dean Wareham, who is known to have played in Galaxie 500 and Luna.

The Offf-Festival is taking place in Paris in June and looks interesting enough. BleepLabs build nice light-sensitive synthesizer robots, Iso 50 is showing some great artwork and Wooster Collective are there too to talk. You can send in your artwork to get published in their catalogue, if it fits to the festival theme “Nostalgia for a past future”. Fitting to the retrofuturistic theme the director of Tron Legacy Joseph Kosinski is a announced speaker and there are several chiptune projects taking place.

Great lonely electro chiptune dubstep from Darkstar and from partner in crime Robot Koch from my hood in Kreuzberg. Darkstar not only did a great remix of “Videotape” by Radiohead. Robot Koch has just released a new album called “Death Star Droid ” on his label “Robots don’t sleep”. You get an idea how it sounds like here.

Mein sehr gespaltenes Verhältnis zur Modefotografie nährt sich von meiner Skepsis gegenüber dem manchmal nicht mehr so offensichtlichen kommerziellen Zweck der Bilder. Das ist profan, aber ich finde auch diesen stylistischen Imperativ anstrengend. Die Jacke passt nicht zu meinem IPhone. Da bringt es auch wenig, sich entweder Mechanismen aus der Kunstgeschichte oder dem Zeitgeschehen anzueignen, ganz schlimm hier (via boingboing). Da macht es für mich auch keinen Unterschied, daß es sehr professionell produziert ist und versucht einen ironischen Humor zu implementieren. Wenn die Bilder aber so eigenständig vom Himmel fallen wie bei Nick Night´s neuer Kampagne für “Kilgour”, vergesse ich gerne kurz alle Vorurteile und freue mich, daß bei entsprechendem Bekanntheitsgrad des Fotografen große künstlerische Freiheit möglich ist. Dort kann ich auch durch die gute Übersetzung gut mit Verweisen auf die Achtziger Jahre leben, die mir sonst schwer im Magen liegen. Showstudio bietet seinen Usern die Möglichkeit via Blog und Live-Videos die Produktionen hautnah mitzuerleben. Alle Björk-Fans können sich zur Zeit ein Riesenposter ihrer Heldin zusammenpuzzeln.

A propos Björk, Carsten Nicolai aka Alva Noto hat zusammen mit Timbaland einen Remix von Björk´s Stück “Innocence” fertiggestellt, der mehr beatorientiertes Material seines nächsten Albums “Unitxt” enthalten soll. Ich bin gespannt und warte immer noch auf HipHop-Beats von ihm oder Herrn Ikeda.

Takeshi Nagata und Kazue Monno haben mehrere, sehr unterhaltsame und schöne Stop-Motion-Langzeitbelichtungs-Animationsvideos gemacht. Ausserdem ist auch dieser Werbeclip entstanden (via boingboing). Die Musik des Clips ist übrigens von “Architecture in Helsinki”, Neo-Shoegazer im Geiste My Bloody Valentines (s. Posting “Don´t look back”). Es gibt ähnliche Resultate als Standbild von zwei jungen Düsseldorfern hier (via heuserkampf). Die Technik ist dabei uralt: Picasso, aufgenommen im Jahre 1949 von Gjon Mili.

Jace Clayton aka Dj Rupture schreibt hier.