Major high fives to my friends at The Fader for a successful relaunch of their .com. It has been great fun to watch their digital presence evolve. Stop by for great music (lots of exclusive tracks) and art/culture features. Congrats guys!

Related: The Fader Goes Digital

Lee Memorial’s new album took me by surprise twice over. First off, I’ll admit that I can’t think of a single Australian act that struck me since I heard Yeo and the Fresh Goods last year. Secondly, a mellowed out acoustic sound with poetic lyrics is not style of music that often captivates beat snobs like myself. You may be familiar with Sodastream, a duo that’s dropped releases in this vein for a decade before breaking up. Half of that now-defunct band, Karl Smith, assembled a band with a decent resume and put together The Lives of Lee Memorial, possibly named for a hospital, is fraught with Smith’s mystifying whines layered together. If you doesn’t sound like your taste, you’re probably not sold, and you’ll just have to take my word for it. It’s not out for a couple of weeks, so you’ve got time to conduct your research.

Deciphering samples is a skill that every DJ and producer hones in order to boast when that original song comes on. Ever since a few cats took the art of sampling and went crazy with it, it’s been harder and harder to breakdown. Take Girl Talk for instance; despite the pop value of every song used in his collages, bet you can’t name every single one. And furthermore, how does this patchwork Lego set of beats and pieces actually come together to form a coherent track? Thanks to Wired Magazine, there’s a translation for folks who consider themselves more on the visual tip. A deconstruction of 30 seconds of a the Girl Talk Song ‘What It’s All About’ reveals 35 samples assembled to create that signature dancefloor crack sound. Great visualization via Wired.

All this chatter of Mos Def and his album on a t-shirt makes us happy. Music Tee’s we spotted last week are coming out in full force. My next question is simple though: What stops people from taking a camera phone picture of the download code on the t-shirt without purchasing it? Similar to the days kids used to bring razor-blades into the record store and slide out the CD quick and undetected. I hope we don’t ever have t-shirts locked up behind security as records and other hard media (DVD’s etc) have now.  I’m excited to watch for sales figures of the Mos Def T-shirt ($40) to see if it has legs.

Philadelphia often spits out something unconventional and intriguing. Bahamadia the whispering lady rapper, G-Love the hipster-ahead-of-his-time, and a band like no other called Black Landlord. I started hearing their name around town a few months back from a few heads gushing about their killer live shows and now there’s a full album to be had. The nine-piece band includes everything but the didgeridoo and gives an instrumental style like a funked out Soil & Pimp, with vocals laid down by founder Maxx Stoyaoff-Williams. Clever, funny, and inherently heavy, Addicted to Distraction kills it in every respect. In regard to album cover, I preferred the pimped out Redd Foxx on their myspace page, but I can see why they went another way with it.

Before the melding of organic hip hop with glitchy processing in Prefuse 73, Guillermo Scott Herren messed with ambient jazz and the chillest nooks of latin music. Many forget that Savath and Savalas brought Herren to Warp Records, leaving many of his records under this alias overlooked. Well, if you haven’t heard it before, now is the time to warm up to it, as we find ourselves smack in the middle of two releases. Stones Throw put out La Llama two weeks ago, living up to the expectations with an array of soundscapes and vocalists. Out in exactly two weeks is Golden Pollen, coming out on Anti, will showcase Herren’s own voice and instrument talents.

Still not convinced? Listen to a track on YouTube.

A lone singer/songwriter on a label that prides itself on producers, Fink landed with Ninja Tune in the late nineties with a pair of EPs, followed by 2001’s downtempo mix Fresh Produce. It wasn’t until five years later that he showed his melodic side on Biscuits for Breakfast, the first record that defines his current style. Since then, he seems to be back on track with his releases. Distance and Time dropped in 2007, and now we’ve got another mellow collection entitled Sort of Revolution. The LP features John Legend on a couple of tracks, as well as a cover of ‘Walking in the Sun’. Another solid Ninja Tune release.

We can thank Diplo and Switch for boldly auto tuning Andy Milonakis toasting, but there’s a lot more to Major Lazer than a comedy gimmick. The tracks heard so far are killer, notably the collaboration with Santogold. This summer their tweaked out brand of dancefloor crack is on the road and there are free and discounted tickets up for grabs (I know the Philadelphia show at Electric Factory is free). Hit ‘tour dates’ on the Bacardi Live website and pick your city. Depending on which show you catch, you might see A-Trak as well.

Nice site (and great music to boot) by Orba Squara. Their website is a place to explore their new music (folksy and fun) and a documentation of their journey around the country playing shows, meeting people, etc. Scroll to the right, and keep going, and going, and going, and going. Well done.

To most of us, DJ Shadow is a mind without a past. Everything he touched became a timeless piece, the demonstration of his powers beginning with 1996’s Endtroducing, an album that quickly became the soundtrack to the lives of many. While we often consider it his first full excursion into sampling production (in fact, it was the world’s first album composed entirely of samples), there was once a young Shadow; one who idolized influences and struggled with his own expressions just like any other artist. Over the past couple of years, we’ve had glimpses into this tape-deck past through The 4-Track Era series of radio mixes. Today we get the entire musical youth of DJ Shadow packaged in box-set entitled The 4-Track Era Bundle, featuring early noise through a now defunct medium that we all still love deep down. Pre-order now!

Anyone who can turn that crappy dance jam ‘What is Love’ into an alluring tune of just voice and Wurlitzer is onto something. Diane Birch, an American singer/songwriter whose preacher dad led her around the world during her childhood, has collected enough insight from her travels to make her expressions all the more interesting. It’s not the ethnic influence that shines through, but rather a maturity that is rare to find in a young artist. Her debut Bible Belt is out today.

The closest many of us will ever get to putting our hands on the wheels of steel is when they release a DJ game a la Rock Band. In the meantime, we can participate in DJ Times Magazine’s America’s Best DJ competition and summer tour. The editors of the magazine hand picked a list of 100 American-born DJ’s that they felt were at the pinnacle of their careers and were the best representatives of their respective music genre’s. Despite sharing a love for spinning, most fans rarely venture outside of their favorite styles. The 20 city tour, which kicked off May 2, aims to expose those fans to music they may not have listened to before. Fans are encouraged to vote online for their favorite DJ’s and they’ll have a chance to wine prize packages that include a trip for two to the closing party/award ceremony September 12 in Las Vegas.

Often while I’m scouring various lists for new releases, I pass over a whole lot of reissues. Sometimes you can get excited about some previously unreleased studio sessions, but it’s almost never the case. However, today there’s an exception: Django Reinhardt, a musician who died over half a century ago, has a handful of recordings up his white-lapelled suit sleeve. Airwaves is one of dozens of compilations that have been released over the past few decades, but this one has several gems that haven’t gone through the whitewashing of modern remastery. The warmth is still there, the clips and pops left on the tracks like little scars, reviving the character that good music in Django’s era carried without question.

The Crystal Method were one of the most ostensible bands of the 90s producer boom. They made densely layered electronic music palatable to the masses, so much so that their old songs are seen today as caricatures of the genre. If that’s what Grammy nominations get musicians, then it’s worth waiting five years to hear a new record from them; one that proves modern sugary production to be over-simple. Everything on Divided By Night is miles away from ‘Trip Like I Do’, and it never dispenses with the big beat rhythms that drove the band’s lesser known contemporaries like Meat Beat Manifesto.

With the smashing success of music based video games such as Rock Band and Guitar Hero, many people are looking for the next logical step in instrumental gaming. Though we’ve been holding out hope for “Marching Band” and some sort of woodwind musical adventure , preferably “Oboe Master”; we think the folks at Activision have probably taken the more advisable route with their plan to focus on club music via DJ Hero. Come Fall ‘09 you’ll be able to bring the dance party to your living room, whilst spinning some hype beats from the comfort of your own couch. So forget those pumped up cover charges and invest in some serious surround sound, because you’re going to have a big beat blowout and we presume everyone’s invited as long as they don’t block the TV. Fricka, fricka, fricka fresh.

Via Uncrate