DEMENCHA » electro

VIDEO: Miles Bonny x B. Lewis – “Bottom To Top”

Chris Mills — Wed, 16 May 2012 16:38:54 +0000

We featured this project some weeks ago, HERE. But you can preview and cop the full Egg Black EP on iTunes NOW.

Looking For Somewhere To Dance in Westport on Saturday? We Got You Covered.

Chris Mills — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 22:49:34 +0000

Between Hy-Tekk Productions, Lotus Camp, Think 2Wice and the independent drawing power of KC house music legend, Pat Nice, we’ve got three super solid options for you to break a leg to this Saturday in Westport. The Union, Gusto Lounge and the Riot Room are partaking in what might as well be a mini club crawl, though we’re not sure if all parties intended for it. Take your sweat with you from bar to bar (they’re all within ~~walking~~ dancing distance of each other).

Vunda Vada @ The Gusto [4.21.12]

Madame E — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 19:35:30 +0000

Just another event to add to the list for this Saturday evening’s festivities…Vunda Vada. A few of our local favorite DJs including Dez Jones, El Nomada, and Johnny Hammerstix will be slapping down “drumoombahbasstep & whatever else we (they) wanna play” according to the event. Regardless of genre this is guaranteed to be a stomping good time. Plus, there is no cover charge! Doors open at 10pm. See you on the dance floor.

Miles Bonny Links Up w/ New York’s B.Lewis, “Egg Black” EP is Out Now

Chris Mills — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 20:58:09 +0000

Kansas City’s heralded DJ/producer/singer, Miles Bonny, recently dropped a project with NYC beat monster, B.Lewis. On this project, Miles is doing vocals over some of Lewis’ original productions. While I don’t necessarily think that Miles’ voice and the electro-soul beats provided by B.Lewis on this project gel very well on most tracks, you can listen for yourself at the player below. Feel free to drop a comment and let us know what you think of Egg Black.

Egg Black EP by Miles Bonny x B.Lewis

TONIGHT: “Run De Dance” w/ Shaun Duval & LC @ Gusto Lounge

Chris Mills — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 18:48:04 +0000

[pictured: Shaun Duval]

With Brent Tactic being out of town at SXSW (jealous), LC is filling in for him alongside Shaun Duval tonight at Gusto Lounge in Westport KCMO. LC typically messes with mostly house music, whereas Tactic is usually all over the place regarding genres. But LC will be a dope addition to the event. This should be your spot if you’re wanting to dance tonight and hear some riotous booty shaking music in Westport.

COSMO BAKER LIVE @ RIOT ROOM (JAN. 20th) + EXCLUSIVE Q&A

Chris Mills — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 19:20:40 +0000

Philly-based DJ and producer, Cosmo Baker, is a real student of music and a true master when it comes to rocking parties. Having collaborated with the likes of King Britt, ?uestlove of The Roots and tons more, Baker’s buzz stretches beyond his origin of Philadelphia to further reaches of the globe. While rocking as part of The Rub DJ crew alongside DJ Ayers and DJ Eleven, their joint ragers (started in 2003) built a legendary foundation on the East Coast. Cosmo Baker holds rank as one of the top dogs in the DJ business, spinning everything from hip hop to funk, house to disco and electro wrapped up in a true-to-the-artform style of mixing, turntablism and anticipation for what can work. As reported HERE, one nine year-old in Hawaii even included one of Cosmo’s CDs in a time capsule back in 2007, citing that “I think that’s what a lot of kids like now…I want to see what kids will like in the future…” We’re not sure which of Cosmo’s CDs were given up, but we are sure that whoever opens that time capsule years from now will have some serious funk on their hands. On Friday, January 20th Cosmo is set to unleash his aforementioned funk on the Riot Room in Westport KCMO (4048 Broadway), which you should RSVP TO RIGHT HERE (and get your presale tickets for a measly $5 HERE).

Below you’ll find a quick but very interesting Q&A we recently did with Cosmo in anticipation for what is guaranteed to be a wild night at Riot on Friday the 20th. Here, he talks about his recent gig in Dubai, his long-standing friendship with ?uestlove, Philly’s “big brother/little brother dynamic” with NYC, and what is sure be to another busy year for him.

Demencha: I saw on your website, cosmobaker.com, that you traveled to the Middle-East recently. What country were you in and what took you there?

Cosmo Baker: Yes man, I went to Dubai. It was really an amazing experience, and the city – and country – are pretty wild. Dubai is like Las Vegas in the sense that it’s incredibly opulent and there’s nothing that’s too extreme – aside from the over the top drugs and sexuality that’s so prevalent in Vegas. But there’s also the old world which is just as potent, and really amazing. And people over there party like crazy, which is why they brought me over there. I ended up doing one show but that ended up turning into a bigger project altogether that I’m involved with and am very excited about. With that being said, I’ll be spending a lot of time in the region in the near future. I was also supposed to hit Beirut, Istanbul and Tel Aviv on the past trip but things got shifted and I didn’t want to spend the holidays by myself 6000 miles away from my family. But sooner than you think, I’ll be back there doing the damn thing.

CM: What was the most fun DJ gig you had last year? No festivals, please.

Cosmo Baker: Hah! But one of my favorite gigs was when I played Flow Festival in Helsinki this summer, over there with so many people I adore… But other than that, I don’t know. There were so many good shows this year. I think maybe the first one that came to mind was The Do-Over in Portland in July. So much fun, such energy, crazy vibes flying all over the place. Do-Over is such an amazing party, so I think I’ll stick with my choice.

CM: Tell us about your friendship with ?questlove from The Roots. How far back do you guys go?

Cosmo Baker: Well he’s a few years older than me but we go back to the early or mid 90s. As a youngster everyone used to hang out on South Street in Philly, and when they were still in high school they used to sit out on the corner of Passyunk and South playing tunes. They were called The Square Roots then, and it was Ahmir, Tariq, the bassist was Josh Abrams and the keyboard player was Scott Storch. Yes – THAT Scott Storch. Anyway, there was this “hip-hop” store around there called The Lay-Up and it was the first place in Philly that brought in a lot of the designers like PNB, 555 Soul, Ecko and lines like that, as well as being the place that imported a lot of the hot mix tapes from New York. This was around 1993 or 1994. Now the thing was that The Lay-Up became the place to hang, the epicenter and gathering place of the hip- hop community of Philly at the time. I actually ended up eventually managing the place, but before that we would hang and watch videos and listen to mix tapes, bomb black books and all that
good shit. They had turntables in the back so I used to come down and DJ and often Ahmir would come in as well after playing on the street corner for hours on end. We just hit it off on a musical level, and were friends ever since. It always marveled me on how innate his talent for DJing was, but eventually I realized that this thing called talent kind of superseded application and genre. If you’ve got it you’ve got it.

CM: How rich is Philly’s music scene? And since you’ve lived in both of the following places, is there a kind of second-city-itis that Philadelphians hold themselves to when looking at New York?

Cosmo Baker: Incredibly rich and incredibly soulful, which is something that kind of comes from the tough living atmosphere of such a working class city. And the sustainability of being able to be an artist is something that Philly definitely offers, although sometimes to detriment because the comfortability the city offers doesn’t always light a fire under the ass of people to strive for bigger and better things. But straight up there was always a big brother / little brother dynamic between Philly and New York, with Philly always trying to play catch-up. That’s one of the reasons why the Philly DJ culture excelled in the way it did. It saw it’s lane and it ran with it.

CM: Give us one youtube link to a good example of Philly soul, and tell us why it rules.

Cosmo Baker: Well first of all, TSOP. Second, the REAL NATIONAL ANTHEM. Third, The
PHILADELPHIA FUCKING PHILLIES.

CM: I’d like to think that most DJs are basically required to do genre-jumping, at least to a degree, in these days and times. Would you agree with that? And what are the most poignant sounds over the years that have landed you where you are today as an internationally-respected DJ?

Cosmo Baker: You have to remember that with the true essence and structure of DJing in the sense of nightclub DJs, – from the hip-hop jocks to the DJs in the nightclubs that spun at the original places like The Loft, The Gallery, Paradise Garage… They all were well versed in crossing genres when they played. It’s a more modern thing to have such specialty niche-locked DJs. Personally I just find it boring and restrictive and unchallenging. And as for what sounds have landed me where I am, that’s a little bit tougher to answer because with me it’s more an amalgamation of everything before. The whole being more than just the sum of its parts. But I’ve always listened to a lot of jazz and the concept of that free flowing improvisation in jazz has definitely effected my DJing both in the sound of things but in the application of the craft.

CM: What specific styles of music are getting your crowds off the wall when you gig, now in 2012?

Cosmo Baker: The majority of stuff that I play these days is dance music and disco classics and a lot of them are my own edits and shit like that. The idea of bridging the gap and going from A to B to me has always been kind of this undercurrent. But I still play rap music when I can cause of course I love it and so do people. But a lot of rap and contemporary R&B is such tepid pop music these days. Don’t get me wrong – I love pop music, but it doesn’t excite me as much as other things.

CM: What do you have on deck for this new year? Releases, shows, other projects, etc.?

Cosmo Baker: Boy, let’s just say that this is going to be a very big year for me. Let’s just hope I can make it to the finish line – which will be December 21st of this year, if those pesky Mayans are correct…

FEATURED ARTIST OF THE MONTH: Luke Rocha aka Topp Boom [Dec. 2011]

Chris Mills — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 04:04:58 +0000

Artist, Luke Rocha (aka beat-maker, Topp Boom) is DIY to the teeth. Having started the blasphemously slept-on SymbolHeavy.com in 2005 to now working with a certain Brooklyn indie-rock icon, (who we cannot name), Luke is constantly learning in addition to holding a distinctly earthy vision of art. But don’t think about the landscape paintings you see for sale at Walgreens. And let’s be honest without coming off as disrespectful – he’s got a lot of room to learn. Luke makes some great sample-based funk and electro-tinged tunes…

Topp Boom (aka Luke Rocha) – “Planet L.O.V.E.” by DEMENCHA MAGAZINE

Topp Boom (aka Luke Rocha) – “Take U Home” by DEMENCHA MAGAZINE

…and has put together art for various publications including Wax Poetics. He also makes his own limited-run zines, but forces out his beats and scrapbook-like artistic works with very little use of current, digital technology…

About his collages, Luke says, “I get more enjoyment out of just cutting and pasting, like I just go mad with some scissors. It’s time consuming, yeah. I became kind of a pro at it though. I’ll use a computer to scan it at the end or whatever.”

Growing up in Topeka where his mom was a jazz singer and his dad a courtroom artist, Luke’s been engulfed by art and music as early as he can remember. While going to elementary school, he met now lifelong friends and current Deep Thinkers, Leonard DStroy and Brother of Moses. Luke dished that he even remembers Lenny D as a breakdancer. While Lenny apparently stuck to his strong suits, DJing and producing beats, and with Brother of Moses mainly sticking to lyricism and art heading into 2012, Luke recalls Raekwon’s album, Only Built For Cuban Linx, which prompted him to start creating his own music as the three of them geeked out over the Wu-Tang member’s flow and more…

“I liked RZA’s beats, just the way he did his beats with a lot of soul samples and stuff. At the same time, it was really dark and sinister. After that I was looking for records and started my beat-digging thing.”

The following interview took place on his front porch in Midtown just a few weeks ago. Luke isn‘t the most adept at social media, but until that changes, keep tabs on his label site, SymbolHeavy.com and Demencha as we bring you the indie-est of the indie and the Kansas City underground’s least dug for. Without further ado, here is our Featured Artist of the Month for December 2011 – Luke Rocha aka Topp Boom.

Demencha: What is and who are Symbol Heavy? Include aliases and what their creative directions are.

Luke Rocha: Symbol Heavy is a record label. I came up with the logo and the name and Drew was like, “Yeah, we should do a label.” Drew introduced me to his friend, Boyd. Boyd was all about it. Boyd’s more of a business man, so he’s the one that did our website and everything. Beatbroker put out the first official release, which was the Brother of Moses and Beatbroker Forward Look EP. It was put on a 12 inch. The 12 inch did pretty good. DJs got it and played it. It was sold locally. Then after that, we put out the Symbol Heavy Volume 1, a compilation. That was more of like, something to showcase our acts that we were gonna come out with. It’s one of those record label albums. There was Topp Boom tracks, Boyd Pro, Dragon Tears, Your Reflection. And it showcased Brother of Moses, Negro Scoe and BGM. Then the label kind of progressed out of hip hop a little bit, too. Electro sounds, early 80’s electronic music kind of sound. That’s what me and Boyd were into. Disco.

Demencha: Are you a born and raised Kansas Citian?

Luke Rocha: I was born in Topeka, Kansas. I grew up in Olathe. That’s where I went to high school. I moved around a lot. I went to middle school in Lenexa at Indian Woods Middle School. I went there with Leonard Dstroy and Brother of Moses. I met them and always had a friendship with them. We got really into hip hop back then (1994). Meeting them and knowing that they were into the same music as me just started our fascination with hip hop and we dabbled in everything – graffiti, DJing. Kyle (aka Leonard Dstroy) used to breakdance. Kyle stuck to DJing and beatmaking. Aaron stuck to rapping, but he still does art. I stuck to just producing and art. I went to high school in Olathe. There’s no like, culture out there really. So I would always come down here (Midtown). I loved Westport. Back in the day there was a shop called Collective Funk and it used to be where Recycled Sounds used to be. Flavor Pak too, it was integral. It was cool to have this magazine that was dedicated to stuff that we liked and had cool art and stuff. We were all about it. We were just like, little kids. We met Jeremy who was this bigger dude, and he kind of introduced us to all these people. We were in like, middle school and high school when Basement Khemist were just starting to do their thing. They got that Vibe Magazine review, that was cool. We all thought like, “Man, they’re gonna make it.” Anyways, that kind of kick started it. We loved anything East Coast at the time. Aaron had Redman, Dare Iz A Darkside, Smiff ‘n Wessun, Wu-Tang Clan, Grand Puba. They were all bootlegged. All these bootleg tapes that he would get from some Beauty Supply store in Missouri. He would always loan them to me and shit. Mobb Deep’s The Infamous was the first CD that we bought.

Demencha: Take us through the process of how you make your beats and why they come out sounding like they do.

Luke Rocha: It’s really just a simple set up of just two turntables hooked into the mixer and then the mixer into the samplers (SP-1200 or SP-404). I don’t really do anything special to get that sound, honestly. It’s just the records that I use. They have that sound already, which I like. I’ll turn up the bass, turn down the hi hats. You know, kind of re-master it. Or I’ll add effects to it and stuff. When I get a beat done, I just dump it into a digital 8 track. It used to be a 4 track until this year, I got my first digital 8 track. It makes my life a hell of a lot easier. No more rewinding tapes to get back to the track. When I record people, it’s like, rappers gotta take sometimes five to ten takes. And I would have to rewind the tape so much that I would think the tape would just be damaged. Now I’ve got this digital thing, where it’s just at the press of a button, you could go back to the beginning of the track. So I just dumped all my sampler stuff into that 4 track and then I just master it. I have a CD dual deck burner so I just burn everything to CD. I just do a quick master. That’s probably where most of the sound comes from. I’m not taking it into any Pro Tools or anything. After a while you just know what kind of sound you want. I like my setup simple. I’m not anti-Pro Tools or anything, or people that make beats on computers. I don’t have the attention span to relearn something like that right now. But if I was getting paid for it, I would. It’s just hard for me to juggle art, music and photography. If I’m not working on music, I’m working on some art pieces. Art’s definitely paid off more than the music has. I find the business to be a lot tougher, the music business.

Demencha: Music seems like the more glamorous way of making money, as opposed to art. But how do you think the ethos of musicians and those of visual artists stack up against each other?

Luke Rocha: If you want to make a lot of money off music, sometimes you have to do stuff that you don’t necessarily want to do. From my standpoint, and my friends, we just make music to hear and if people like it then that’s awesome but I guess that if we were more on the pop side, we’d probably have better chances of succeeding in music. I could be as crazy as I want with art and way more experimental, but with music I can still get experimental but you turn a lot of people off if it’s too crazy or if it doesn’t have appeal. I’m not saying I hate pop music, I think there’s some catchy tunes but I’m just saying that’s why it’s probably particularly harder for musicians nowadays. It sucks because I see so much talent here in KC. A lot of them work harder than I do at music. It sucks that there’s not a bigger avenue for them. Look at Lady Gaga. I consider her a visual artist. Look at her shows, look at what she wears. Everything’s strategic. There’s artists that dub themselves “performance artists” and not musicians, and they do the same thing. The whole art thing can come hand in hand. I guess it just depends on how you look at it. To me, making a CD is art. The Topp Boom thing is to me, a big art project. It’s just this character I created. Bootsy Collins kind of made this character of himself, so now he always wears the glasses. Topp Boom is kind of a more modern version of that.

Demencha: Tell us about the band you’re a part of, Your Reflection. You guys have a new album coming out called “Electric Indian”. Who’s doing what in that project?

Luke Rocha: Your Reflection is a group that I started with my friend Mike, who is from KC but currently lives in Boston. He went to Paseo. He was in kind of a landmark punk group from here called The Breakups. He was also in another group from Lawrence called The Anniversary. He’s got a big music background, more so than I do. He’s a working musician in Boston, and he’s currently the touring manager for Twin Shadow. It’s a group I started with him. He’s a huge synthesizer fanatic. We used to swap tracks and just do silly keyboard things. I wanted to make an album that was kind of earthy but electronic. The old meets the new. “Electric Indian” is kind of a perfect thing because I’m really intrigued by Indian culture. But when you mix it with analog electronics and stuff, we could create this whole new world. We plan to get visual with that. Mike does video too, so we’re gonna make a video that goes with it. Also, my brother (Patrick Rocha) is in the group. He just plays keyboards here and there, he’s not on every track. So it’s pretty much me and Mike’s brainchild. Then we have session players who play in. There’s a guy who plays guitar on three tracks. There’s vocals but they’re really subtle. It’s an all instrumental album, pretty much. I wanted to make it kind of a psychedelic, electronic rock thing…

Your Reflection – “Native Bounce” [from the forthcoming album - Electric Indian] by DEMENCHA MAGAZINE

…I’m a huge fan of psychedelic music. There’s still that breakbeat background. I think heads will be into it as well. It’s a bridging the gap thing. But I kind of want it to be its own entity, not copy off too many sounds. It’s something I really look forward to. I put a lot of work into it. So it’s really kind of the first album that I’m gonna try to push hard, like harder than I’ve pushed any other album. We’re gonna try to send it to Wax Poetics and see if maybe they could pick up a single or something. Right now we’re in the process of putting up a couple of free tracks on the Symbol Heavy website.

Demencha: Talk about the zines that you’ve made, specifically “The Silence Is Killing Us”.

Luke Rocha: There were these guys in the hood selling these “Stop Snitchin” shirts and stuff. Then there were these billboards, “The Silence Is Killing Us”, meaning that if you weren’t fessing up to the cops then it’s not helping matters with the city anyways. During that period, all that stuff was collected from 2005. I was just really interested in that huge crime wave that was going on and they were really documenting it big time in the (Kansas City Star). It was funny because The Pitch did a story on KC crime, they called it “Killer City”. It just became this subject. Then there was that Kansas City Star book that came out that was called “Kansas City Crime Central”. I made this zine before that book, but that book documents a lot of famous crime stories in Kansas City…

…I just like Kansas City for the fact that it’s got so much history but some of the history can be fucked up, or it just gets lost in the shuffle of the East Coast and West Coast. The whole Midwest, minus Chicago and Detroit I guess, is this kind of forgotten area. But really, there’s a lot of beautiful art and rich history, rich music history. If you’re into art and music, you’ll definitely love Kansas City. As far as opportunities go for them and jobs – it’s a hustle. It’s not like New York where there’s a crowd for everything and you can pretty much pick up a job doing something. But there’s a lot of fish in the sea in New York. A lot of dudes trying to do what you’re doing. KC is so small, it can be tight-knit at times. But there’s a lot of young talent that comes out and shit. That zine (“The Silence Is Killing Us”) was basically a diary of that year, you know? I like taking photography in my spare time and shoot Polaroids of people, signs, and just put it together in a scrap book form. I’m thinking I might start a website dedicated to the zines for people who aren’t in KC that can’t buy (them).

Demencha: Brag on yourself here and talk about the different kinds of projects that you’ve been a part of.

Luke Rocha: My brother kind of kick started that. He was going to school for visual arts in New York, he started in 2000. He was there until 2003. He got art gigs doing like freelance commercial jobs for magazines and clothing companies. He did an ad for Converse. He did a couple shirts for Carhartt. He got a job with Flaunt Magazine and they did a story on hip hop in Israel. He did a drawing to go with it. He was making some pretty decent money doing that. He came back to KC and saw what I was doing and I had done this collage of Betty Davis and another one of Dennis Coffey. He was like, “You should send the Wax Poetics editor your stuff.” And I did. I sent him two jpegs of that and I was like, “I’m a huge fan of your magazine. If you ever need some contributing art just let me know.” It took like a full year and the guy got back to me, the editor, Andre Torres. He hired me to do an illustration on Hank Shocklee. And I was like, “Hell yeah,” because I love the Bomb Squad. That led to me doing their anthology book, which was cool. I got to do a story on the 12×12 section. Around that time, I got more confident. Started sending people stuff. I did some album cover work. I did one for Archetype. More or less, Nezbeat bought my painting that I had and they ended up using that painting for their album, Bleed For Them. Then the Architects hired me to do their Revenge cover. There was this group, Blackout Gorgeous, that Nezbeat was a part of. He hired me and another cat to do the whole album cover thing. Stuff started to snowball. Riot Magazine in Australia did this cool story on Symbol Heavy and they published the Betty Davis picture that I did. I suddenly had this good body of work that I could try to sell and make some occasional money here and there, just to do some kind of illustration for some story.

Demencha: Say a really young kid was to ask you “What is art?” For a lot of people it’s really easy to just sum it up in one word and say, “Expression.” Is it that simple for you?

Luke Rocha: It’s kind of a complex question to me because art can be anything really. It could be some white lady in Wyandotte county wearing a Tupac t-shirt. She’s like, maybe fifty years old. But it’s like some hand-me-down shirt she has, you know? To me, there’s a lot of beauty in that. A photograph-worthy kind of thing. Two different worlds colliding, kinda. So I would tell kids, art could be anything you want it to be. There’s so many different things that I see as art. I tend to take photos of it, or collect it. The kind of art that I do is kind of dependent on what other people have done in the past. I’m taking my influences and wearing them hardcore on my sleeve.

Demencha: Your music is sample-based and your visual art is sample-based for the most part with your collages…

Luke Rocha: Yeah, definitely. It’s the same kind of approach. You can take bits and pieces of something and totally make it your own. People knock sampling like that, but it’s like you could make your own song off of ten different records, blend it all together and it’s a whole new composition. If you need a horn, I can’t afford a horn player so I’m gonna go take like a small fraction of a horn and maybe chop it up. Plus it’s already mastered in their studio. They slaved over that sample. I mean, they slaved over that musicianship. I’ll just take like take a part of it. In gratitude, it’s all genuine sampling.

Demencha: What do you mean by that?

Luke Rocha: I mean I don’t do it for the sake of like a hit or anything, or take the Puff Daddy approach where I’ll redo the whole song with another chorus of another song. I mean, I get what he’s doing, you know? I still take pride in finding a rare loop and exposing it to people that haven’t heard it. I feel like it’s my duty and of other producers like me that are more of the diggers, to hip people on some of these undiscovered groups or just expose them to new sounds that they wouldn’t necessarily be into. I like that. Making something out of nothing. I take chances when I buy records. Your ear becomes a lot better. You know what to find. And the same thing with art. Art’s easier in the fact that you know your visual sense right away. So you can just use that. With music it’s like, you gotta listen to it again and you gotta see if it goes with that other sample.

Demencha: You like Company Flow, right?

Luke Rocha: Yeah.

Demencha: They did a song with DJ Krush called “Vision of Art” several years ago. The first line of that song starts with “You’ve got a very soft vision of art”. I don’t want you to necessarily try to explain what El-P meant by that, but if someone were to tell you that something was done through a hard vision of art, or a soft vision of art, what would you make of it?

Luke Rocha: There’s so many different kinds of art. From greeting cards at Hallmark all the way down to big ass sculptures in the park to fine art and paintings to low-budget Polaroids. My approach is kind of like, unpretentious. Anything to me is art in a weird way. But some are stronger than others. It’s your job to create your own art in a way, your own atmosphere where people will say, “Oh, that reminds me of such and such.” With art you can create your own world, you can create your own time and space. Nobody can mess with that. When you leave this world, you leave that behind. People need to stop getting so philosophical about it. Art can be fucking anything, you know? To me, I’m still learning dude, that’s why I ask people’s opinions. I never think I’m too good to ask other people’s opinions. It only makes you better at it. Like, my dad, he was doing all these paintings that he really liked but they just weren’t selling. So he went back to the basics and just started doing these small scale pencil things. Now they’re selling like hotcakes. He found his market. He found something that he could just keep pushing out. Sometimes you’ve got to break out of your box just to get a little notoriety and then after that you can pretty much do whatever the hell you want to do. I’m trying to think of a producer or a singer who’s done that. Sun-Ra was like that. Marvin Gaye was like that. Marvin Gaye made standard r&b hits, then on his later 70’s albums he got more experimental with the sounds. That’s what I really liked about him. Each album was a major transition. I like that approach – unpredictable. Your influences come from anywhere at anytime. And I’m not afraid of my influences. That’s what I try to do with my mixes. I could easily put the new Lil Wayne single on there or something. Put something on there that nobody’s heard or it’s slept on or something, you know? Hopefully somebody will get some shit out of it.

The Union’s 1 Year Anniversary, w/ Norrit, Steez Harvey, LC, & More [12.9.11]

Chris Mills — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 23:35:38 +0000

(photo courtesy of Brooke Northern)

While the work week rears its ugly head once again tomorrow, there’s always light at the end of the tunnel. The Union’s 1 year anniversary party this Friday should serve as the shining event that you can look forward to, blinding you of whatever it is you do Monday through Friday, 9-5. Just remember to bring a willingness to get down, as The Union’s rambunctious crowd has maintained a rep for partying harder than any other venue in Westport over the past 12 months. Sweat out the problems and troubles of the looming week this Friday with the stellar DJ names noted in the flyer above.

TONIGHT: Risky Disco @ Indie on Main [Official Chromeo Afterparty]

Chris Mills — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 15:28:51 +0000

Brent Tactic and Bill Pile are bringing their super rad Risky Disco event to Indie on Main tonight for the official Chromeo afterparty. Indie is located right next to the Midland Theatre, where Chromeo is scheduled to rock tonight. You can get in easily from inside the Midland as a matter of fact. I’ve been super hype on Risky Disco over the past couple of years or so since Brent and Bill started it up. So much so that I voted for it in the Pitch’s readers choice “Best Of” issue as best club night. It didn’t win, but it should have.

Check our interview with P-Thugg from Chromeo below, and bring yourself downtown tonight:

EPISODE 3 – Chromeo Podcast Interview (October 2011) [DEMENCHA.COM] by DEMENCHA MAGAZINE

Chromeo Podcast/Interview for Demencha Magazine [Soundcloud]

Chris Mills — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 15:36:52 +0000

P-Thugg, from the iconic electro-funk band, Chromeo, spoke with us on the phone for about fifteen minutes a couple of weeks ago. In anticipation for Chromeo’s performance at the Midland Theatre on October 20th (next week), we thought it would be right to unleash our latest soundcloud interview/podcast, in part previewing the event.

In this brief interview, P-Thugg dishes a bit as to what we can expect from his performance alongside Dave 1 for the KC leg of their tour, why 80s music is still recyclable, how he and Dave 1 met, and a lot more, er…at least as much as we could fit into a fifteen minute time block.

EPISODE 3 – Chromeo Podcast Interview (October 2011) [DEMENCHA.COM] by DEMENCHA MAGAZINE