FLYRT

producer for a couple musicians in town; writer for a couple pubs in town.

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TUMBLR DEMS

a few very rough songs i’ve decided to release through tumblr (lol). the first is sorta garage-y, with yelling soul vocals around a speedy drum break. second is built on an Arthur Russell sample and an LL Cool J song that I scratch/blend in throughout.

whatcha think? any potential? or meh?

[flyrtreynolds]

I wrote three of the records off here (which were originally released on my demo) in my dorm room at the U of Oregon. The beats were simple and warm, not much beyond some samples and drums, but two of the tracks (”This Shit” and “Need Your Love”) went on to become kinda big on the blogs.

They haven’t necessarily aged the best per se, and I think frat bros gave them the most spins tbh, but they were my first forays into production, and Sol really did wonders with them in terms of songwriting when you think of how little I gave him to work with...

We’re both older now and a long ways from the state schools we went to, the beer pong games and sticky basement parties that these songs were made for. But Sol has used them to help build a very solid career as a professional musician and just a few months ago, here in L.A. at The Prince in Koreatown, “This Shit” came on at the restaurant and made me look cool in front of a group of friends. “I think I made this in my dorm room?” I announced to the table. 

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WHERE YA BEEN, FLYRT?

A little bit of everywhere, MAN … after a bad breakup and five months of lockdown solo, I decided it was finally time for me to leave my beloved NYC behind, the place where I spent my 20s and learned everything about myself…

So I bought a car and drove, drove and drove. I think I’ll start posting pictures here from my year and change on the road to help me wrap my head around it cause it was as beautiful as it was lonely …  a period that kind of fucked me up but also took me to some strange and majestic places.

This picture is from a record store in Astoria, Oregon, where the Goonies was filmed (and where I lived for five months, if you can believe it). The store was dusty and packed to the walls with records, plants, cats and out-of-tune instruments, the kind of vibe hip Brooklyn storefronts wish they could cultivate. The owner was part of a dying breed, one of those classically cranky record store clerks, annoyed you’re asking them about an album even though it looks like no one’s been in there for years …

A stones throw from the store is a huge, beautiful bay. And some miles down from that is the roaring pacific ocean, lined by old growth forests that are as quiet as a mouse. I’d post pictures of that stuff here too, but Tumblr seems to get overwhelmed by multiple images (and, well, the platform has seen better days). good to be back, baby!

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MY FAVORITES FROM 2021, WHATA SHITTY YEAR...BUT NOT FOR MUSIC?!

FRIEND REVIEWS OF PLAYLIST...

"COOL"

"SOLID"

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FLYRT ALBUM COVER FROM THE PANDEMIC. ORIGINAL ARTWORK BY EDWARD CUSHENBERRY FOR THE PROJECT 'CITY BEATS.'

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NEW FLYRT SONG (10/10)

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MAKING HOUSE MUSIC ANTHEMS HELPED CHANNEL TRES LEARN SELF-LOVE

Channel Tres is still getting used to being stationary. By trade, the producer, who grew up between Compton and Lynwood in California, is a maestro of movement, whether it’s commanding dancefloors to let loose of their inhibitions or gyrating joyously himself on stage while on tour.

Since his self-titled debut EP in 2018, which introduced his Midwest-inspired brand of compelling vocal house music, he’s seldom been in one place very long, performing in arenas around the world with pop legends like Robyn and frequently being beckoned to the recording studio to help other artists finish their records, like Disclosure. He also recently featured on SG Lewis’ hit ‘Impact’ (again with Robyn) and has friends in high music places: a quick look at his Instagram reveals that Elton John is a big fan; and so is last month’s Mixmag cover star James Blake, as is Tyler, The Creator, who features on the woozy ‘fuego’ from Channel Tres’ new EP ‘i can't go outside’.

But just as the Coachella performance was booked and the rock stardom lifestyle seemed within reach, he was told to rush back to Los Angeles before the airports closed on account of COVID-19. Channel, whose chunky basslines and pulsing drumwork are designed to get crowds moving, suddenly had no dancefloors left to ignite.

And so, like the rest of us, he’s been stuck inside. What does an artist who’s spent the past two years traveling and performing nonstop do when there’s nowhere to go and no one to perform to? They create, of course, whether they feel like it or not.

“Making music is never limited to good days because if you only work when you feel good, you will never get nothing done,” he tells me. “[It’s] my job, so things don’t happen if I don’t do anything.”

This mantra motivated Channel, real name Sheldon Young, to create an entire project reflecting his life in lockdown, aptly titled ‘i can't go outside’.

Because of COVID, he had to handle the project’s creation process almost entirely himself, from playing the instruments to recording his vocals to mixing the songs. It was the most “gruelling” recording process he’s ever been a part of, he explains, because he had no environments to test the product in — no plane rides where he could listen to the songs on headphones, no crowds to gauge their reactions from.

But the process allowed him to expand his artistry, including playing with more improvisational, jazz-inspired production techniques, as well as brushing up on basic musical skills, like piano. Maybe most importantly, it also simply gave him something to do.

“It was kind of the thing that kept me going,” he says. “I get bored easily, and when I get bored, I start getting anxiety. I just have to find different ways to challenge myself, and putting this project together was a way for me having something to work toward.”

Young and I are speaking over the phone nearly a thousand miles apart, as he looks out on what he tells me is a grey melancholy day in L.A., and I look out upon a rare sunny winter afternoon on the Oregon Coast. I comment that we seemed to have magically switched weather for the day, and we both chuckle a bit, but I can tell neither of us is feeling particularly inspired at first.

Channel Tres gave me one of his first interviews a few years ago, not long after he cold-emailed his homemade demo to a long list of label execs and landed a deal with L.A. outfit Godmode Music as a result. Since then, I’ve watched his trajectory as an artist grow immensely, compelling me to daydream that we’d one day talk for a cover story set in a colourful setting.

The universe, however, had other plans, and now together we’re simply trying to survive day 200-something of quarantine. We mainly talk about the coping mechanisms we’ve discovered during these strange and surreal times, some good, some bad. “I might eat the wrong food or I’m not supposed to be drinking soda all day, [but then] I’m drinking soda all day,” he confesses. “Just not doing anything to really feed the positive side of my mind, just kind of letting my brain go on autopilot. Which sometimes is good, but it’s not good to do that all the time.”

Suffice to say, Young, like the rest of us, has been trying his best. In fact, he’s generally been proactive, not only using his time at home to grow artistically, but also emotionally — to address certain issues he’d been ignoring over the years in the midst of chasing success.

These issues are brought up almost immediately on the intro to ‘i can't go outside’, when he raps over a floating beat shuffling in reverse, “I need to stop waking up in cold sweats/I need to forget some of the things I did.” He’s referring to the start of lockdown, he tells me, when he would often have intense nightmares centred around places of his past, like his high school or childhood home.

These flashbacks inspired him to seek out a therapist for the first time since college, and their sessions together played a big role in the making of the EP. “I was just unpacking a lot of trauma I went through, and so it naturally crossed over,” he says. “This project was a lot of just me learning how to channel those different things in my head.”

Nowhere is that more evident than on the plodding ‘broke down kid interlude’, where a pitched-up Young rattles off thoughts about the inner tug-of-war that sometimes occurs between his old self, the kid who grew up in Compton, and his newer, more successful self, the artist who just bought a house with money from his music.

I ask if that conflict comes from a place of doubt, whether being out of the routine of performing has stirred up a sense of imposter syndrome at all. He acknowledges my interpretation but says the song is primarily centred around healing wounds from his childhood. “Yes, I’m forming a path; yes, I’m a rockstar; yes I’m all that, and I love it,” he says. “But I’m still Sheldon, I’m still that little boy from Compton and Lynwood inside. I still have to nurture him and make sure he’s alright.”

One way he’s been doing that in quarantine is with innocent child-like activities, like riding a bike or jump roping. Some of ‘i can't go outside’ reflects that rediscovering of joy, like ‘2000 chevy malibu’, a breezy homage to his first car made from a four-year-old beat he found on his laptop and revamped. There’s also the project’s single, ‘Skate Depot’, a thumping groove that harkens back to the sonics of his first two projects by blending thick bass and drum layers with smooth chords.

In the video for the single, Young is sporting a fuzzy peach-coloured shirt and blueberry pants as he zooms around a sunny L.A. neighbourhood on old-school roller skates. I watch it after our conversation and smile with the new understanding that he’s checking in on his inner child by roller skating.

But few of us have been able to focus solely on ourselves in quarantine, which is partly why it’s been so antagonizing. People are dying every day — nearly 3,800 in the United States as I write this — and the disease has disproportionately targeted communities of color and those who are most vulnerable, like the elderly.

Out of precaution, Young has been distancing himself from his loved ones and trying not to worry about them. This was especially difficult last summer, when many of his friends were participating in the social justice protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, a time in L.A. he now describes as being “hot” for its boiling levels of tension. “I’m outside, and it’s just motherfuckin’ police and... like 50 of ‘em on one car, the SWAT team,” he recalls. “I’m seeing all that shit, friends are at protests. And then we are losing our loved ones [cause of COVID] at the same time, so it was just a lot. I had no faith in humanity, I had no faith in nothing.”

Even his faith in music waned as he was still grappling with his recent show cancellations and unsure of how he was going to make income going forward. This, along with the vandalization of his car around that time, filled him with an anger that made the joy-filled dancefloors he was orchestrating before the pandemic seem like a distant dream.

But something — maybe his therapy sessions, maybe simply his duty to the job — led Young back to his creativity, where he was able to channel his anger into art, specifically the song ‘fuego’, named for the intense emotions he was feeling both in himself and around L.A. at the time. “[The song is] just me questioning art, questioning myself as a man, as a Black man, questioning the world, why is it the way it is,” he describes. “But all in all, with all the negativity that’s going on, for me and my family I’m going to make sure we’re fuego — I’m gonna make sure we’re fire.”

So to help finish the record he recruited rapper Tyler, The Creator, which he found symbolic in that Tyler is “another great Black man that’s done tremendous things.” Together, over a beat that smoulders with distorted bass and sprinkles of Rhodes, they rap flaunty lines and hurl cheeky insults at their competition like, “You just a beat they gon’ flip.”

It continues Young’s thread of tongue-in-cheek songs that carry political undertones, like ‘Sexy Black Timberlake’ on 2019’s ‘Black Moses’ EP, a seemingly carefree groove that’s actually pointing out the objectification of Black men, and ‘Jet Black’ from his debut, a celebration of Black pride within a two-step anthem.

‘Fuego’ also marked the inflection point where Young stopped viewing quarantine as an inhibitor and instead an opportunity to grow. Which then set in motion the recording of ‘i can't go outside’, as well as the creation of Art For Their Good, the production company that released the project and will one day function as a non-profit for kids in the Compton area, he hopes. During lockdown he was able to donate instruments to the Compton Unified School District and host some online production classes for students.

When I ask him what’s changed since those early days of lockdown, Young is quick to point to his mental health. “I’m a lot stronger than I was,” he says. “I’m just very positive and excited for when things do get back up and running for me.” He then eagerly describes how he wants his tour setup to be bigger and more dynamic than before once venues reopen. But before he goes too deep into the future, he catches himself and walks back a bit, no doubt another coping mechanism considering we’re still unsure of when this will all end. “I’m also just taking my time in being at home and really cherishing it, appreciating it and just being better with myself,” he reiterates. “Self-love is very important, and [I’m] just learning how to do that better.”

I take his advice to heart as we hang up, and we’re once again both left to our own devices.

https://mixmag.net/feature/channel-tres-cover-interview-house-music-anthems

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THE STORY BEHIND THE LEAK OF A MYTHOLOGIZED RAP ALBUM

When one of hip-hop’s most mythical albums was finally unearthed, the artist behind it, Jay Electronica, praised Allah for its unforeseen release.

The long-rumored album’s unlikely emergence occurred after it was leaked by a 19-year-old hacker. And according to that hacker, it took only about five minutes to dig up Act II: The Patents of Nobility (The Turn), a project that was first announced in 2007 and, thanks to pressure brought on by the leak, released in an official capacity on TIDAL last month (before being taken down quietly not long after).

The album sat in cloud storage of one of Electronica’s collaborators for eight years, the hacker says, a fact he deduced from the digital time stamp imprinted on it. He claims it was located in a folder with a title that referenced Manhattan’s Jungle City Studios. (Electronica’s collaborators dispute this claim).

It likely would have remained in that folder indefinitely if the hacker, who insists on remaining nameless but divulges he’s a college-enrolled male in the U.S., had not come across the names of Electronica’s inner circle and, on a whim, decided to break into each of their laptops.

After only a few minutes, he discovered gold. Act II, a coveted album that had gained folkloric status after being promised and pushed back numerous times over the years, was nestled neatly in a .zip file, its file names nearly identical to a tracklist released by Electronica in 2012. Although the hacker broke in looking for the album, he didn’t actually expect to find it.

“I was excited and didn’t know what to do with it,” he says. “[I didn’t know] whether to keep it to myself or not.”

He decided on leaking it and created a “group buy,” which is what happens when an online community pools money together to purchase a product. He set a target funding goal of $9,000 and leaked the track “Real Magic” as proof that he actually had the goods. The goal was achieved in about two weeks.

Just like that, Act II, perhaps only surpassed by Dr. Dre’s Detox in lost-album infamy, was finally out in the world. But with it brought questions. How did the hacker find the album in the first place? What right did he have to release Electronica’s fabled opus? And did Electronica agree with his reasoning?

My journey to find the origins of the leak begins in early October, as I start poking around for clues and end up falling into a strange corner of the internet, full of encrypted messages, mysterious aliases, and shadowy industry figures.

I find the hacker’s online identity by tracing the digital footsteps of the album’s leak: first on Twitter, where whispers are circulating of a large purchase for the project, then on Reddit, where a user tells me of an infamous moderator on the forum LEAKTHIS, an online community with a collective interest in unearthing (mostly illegally) unreleased music.

“He won’t talk to you lol,” the user warns.

LEAKTHIS members share a mutual admiration for the hacker, often replying to his threads with a goat emoji. But despite his reputation as a reclusive figure, he quickly agrees to talk with me for this story.

“I like providing music for people that otherwise they wouldn’t hear,” he explains when I ask him why he leaks projects. “But I also like collecting songs myself that will never leak or anything.”

I’m speaking with him through an encrypted app that deletes our message history often. My questions are frequently shut down, as he tries to avoid divulging any details that could lead authorities or other hackers to discovering his real identity. He often goes silent for days, or if I push too hard on the wrong topic, he’ll leave the conversation altogether.

He usually comes back, though. Once, after telling me he’s finished speaking with me, he pops up with a name and address accompanied by a blurry selfie picture of a teenage boy. He mistakenly thought I’d written a recent VICE feature on leaking culture and wants to expose the real identity of the 17-year-old hacker at the center of it.

“Great job, you guys interviewed a rapist, pedophile, animal abuser :-),” he captions the picture.

Whether he did this because he feels left behind or just because he wants to let me know I’ve chosen the wrong subject, I don’t know. It seems to prove that he does hold at least some of the power that users on Reddit and LEAKTHIS claim, though.

Looking through LEAKTHIS, you can see he’s shared unheard gems by beloved artists like TDE rapper Isaiah Rashad, the Weeknd, and Kid Cudi.

And then there’s his crown jewel, Act II.

“We weren’t going to get the album regardless,” he says when I ask him whether he believes he stole it. “The album has been nothing but positives for him.”

He’s quick to point out how it’s earned rave reviews from both fans and critics alike, as well as approval by Electronica himself, who, in a retweet of hip-hop journalist Angela Lee about the project, added: “A.P.I.D.T.A. Allah is indeed the best of planners. Humbled by the love its [sic] receiving.”

Then there’s the fact that some of Electronica’s collaborators were in the Discord channel, an invite-only chat platform, that was promoting the group buy. They were annoyed by the leak at first, the hacker says, but then “happy” to support it.

Was that the truth? Not quite, according to some of Jay Electronica’s collaborators.

“The story [the hacker is] putting out there is definitely not accurate,” says Mike Chav, the audio engineer who worked on Act II and whose Dropbox was the one supposedly hacked. “You gotta think who stands to benefit from things, and we kind of came to our own conclusions.”

Chav, along with other members of Electronica’s team (including the rapper’s tour DJ TJ The King), went “Scooby Doo detective,” as he puts it, after hearing about the group buy. So they entered the Discord channel in search of clues. What they found didn’t add up in their eyes, and they quickly came to their own determination: Someone they knew in the music industry had given the hacker the files to leak.

Their reasoning is based on perceived errors in the hacker’s story: Chav almost never uses his Dropbox to exchange files, he says, and he never used it to transfer Act II, which sits on two hard drives at his home. And while the members of Electronica’s team acknowledge they’ve used Jungle City Studios before, they say they never recorded any of Act II there, so it wouldn’t make sense for the file to be named after it.

Their suspicions were heightened by a longtime “super fan” of Electronica who they’d met multiple times in person at shows. According to the fan, who approached them in a sidechat on Discord, the hacker had done “business” with big-name artists before and had contact with another Discord member who was widely considered a figure in the music industry.

This figure, who, based on the fan’s description, Chav recognized as someone once in their inner circle, could have handed the album off to the hacker.

“Whoever created the smokescreen kind of played [the hacker] like a little puppet,” says DJ TJ The King. “Our impression is that some 19-year-old kid from Middle America didn’t just stumble upon this, you know? [Electronica] didn’t believe it either.”

The hacker tells me that this shadowy figure is in fact “a friend of Jay Electronica” but denies receiving Act II from them. They only confirmed its authenticity, he says.

“I’m sure Jay’s team doesn’t remember exactly what was where nearly a decade ago lol,” he counters, before adding that he does in fact work with labels, but not in this case. “I help them, they help me, and I don’t go to jail.”

Regardless of who you believe, both sides do agree on one thing: Electronica was pleasantly surprised by the leak, even behind closed doors.

“Any other time, Jay would be pissed that this happened,” says TJ. “But it was like, everyone was on lockdown, and we were supposed to have been on the road… So we’re kind of sitting here twiddling our thumbs.”

Electronica, just like Chav and TJ, didn’t believe the hacker had anything at first. “They’re gonna be mad when they find out it’s just stuff that’s [already] out,” TJ remembers Electronica telling him when he called to share news about the group buy.

What’s more, Electronica was dealing with a death in his family, so his attention lay far off from music. But then the buy was completed for Act II—or at least the “shell” that would have been released officially had it gone through the proper mixing, mastering, and clearing channels, TJ confirms—and his Twitter timeline was set ablaze with reactions to the project. He couldn’t believe it.

“I really love [him],” the hacker says when I ask him why exactly he went looking for Act II in the first place. “He’s been a big influence on my life and helped me push forward when things have been rough.”

The positive response to the album, reiterated vigorously on social media, perhaps washed away an insecurity within Electronica that fans wouldn’t like his debut, the main reason it was never officially released, TJ tells me.

“Jay thought at the time that people wouldn’t like it because it sounds so different from what was popular,” he says, adding that the inability to clear all of the album’s samples also played a part in its shelving (and most likely its recent pulling from TIDAL).

By that account, perhaps the hacker was right: While it may have not benefited Electronica financially (he wished he could monetize it somehow or even receive the 9K that was raised, TJ tells me), the leak may well have been a positive for him. Not long after its release, Electronica joined the group buy’s Discord channel and even created his own as a way of directly reaching his fans, according to both the hacker and TJ.

“I will say it’s only fitting for it to be released like this,” Chav admits. “Like, more mystery, more weird shit that has continuously followed all of the Jay Electronica projects.”

I tend to agree. For years, Act II was a myth, and then it was here. And then, of course, it was gone again. The hacker, the shadowy figure, the colleagues posing as detectives—they’re all part of the magic trick that’s been Electronica’s career.

If we were to follow the rules of a trick outlined in the 2006 film The Prestige, which Electronica references in his project titles, we start with The Pledge, then we go to Act II: The Turn and then we finish with “the prestige,” where we’re supposed to bring back what’s disappeared.

In this case, the leak served as the third act. It’s up to the audience to decide which player was behind it. This brings us to our final suspect: Electronica himself.

As many have pointed out, it wouldn’t be out of character for the mysterious rapper to leak his own album. In fact, when I tell friends that I’m writing this piece, that’s typically their first question: “Did he do it himself?”

TJ brings up (and denies) the rumors without prompt.

“Jay really had songs on there that he didn’t want out,” TJ says, pointing to the fact that a handful of verses on the project are rough sounding and mumbled out, seemingly as reference tracks to be recorded properly later. “A lot of people kept thinking, ‘Aw man, Jay leaked it!’ Nah, Jay is not the type of person that would leak something.

“Jay would take songs off of that and just put them on the internet; he’s done that plenty of times,” TJ adds. “Half of those songs that were on there, he put out. Maybe two or three songs that no one’s heard. The songs he wanted people to hear, they were out.”

The hacker denies these rumors, too. The one player who doesn’t, of course, is Electronica himself. Like any good magician, he keeps the illusion going.

“Every trick consists of three parts,” he recently typed out in the group buy’s Discord before mysteriously leaving the channel.

https://www.complex.com/music/2020/12/jay-electronica-act-2-leak-story

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THUNDERCAT ALBUM REVIEW (7.4/10)

Thundercat the bassist and Thundercat the lyricist arise from separate sides of Stephen Bruner’s brain. The former is a fleet-fingered virtuoso, plucking out lines as dazzling and complex as a star system. The words on top of those basslines, meanwhile, are far less methodical, fraught with hazy existential questions, references to getting so smashed he can’t find his shoes, and shout-outs to his cat. Together, they form songs that sound equally enchanting and unfinished, frivolous and deep. Drunk, his 2017 opus, effortlessly toed the line between Bruner as mighty bandleader and introverted doodler, with immense funk grooves slotted next to sonnets about feeling strange.

It Is What It Is could serve as a companion piece to Drunk, even though it arrives more than three years later. Bruner is still getting tipsy and pondering what waits for us in the beyond. There’s growth and acceptance in that wonder—the title suggests as much— but not necessarily in the songwriting. The album lacks the anchoring power of a full-bodied jam like “Them Changes,” “Heartbreaks + Setbacks,” or even his 2011 George Duke cover “For Love I Come,” leaving us lost inside Bruner’s mind.

That isn’t always a bad place to be. “I Love Louis Cole” (featuring—who else?—Brainfeeder artist Louis Cole) could score the Willy Wonka Tunnel Of Terror with its ominous strings and increasingly wild-sounding drums. It ends abruptly, just as Wonka’s boat trip does, on an orchestral flourish. On the other end of the spectrum, “King Of The Hill” is the most pared-down we’ve heard Bruner in a while, as he hums over a refreshingly simple and spooky beat made with the help of Flying Lotus and BADBADNOTGOOD.

His bass playing remains captivating. “Unrequited Love” opens with a swirl of strums and intricate jazz fills before giving way to a reverberant instrumental accentuated by heavy snares. “Funny Thing” highlights his trademark low-pass Moog tone, which he’s honed to imitate the croak of the oldest and nastiest-looking toad you could imagine. And “How Sway” is a masterclass in lightspeed chord changes.

But “How Sway” also features two words total—“ayy” and “yo”—which indicates how unpolished some of these compositions feel. “How I Feel” starts off promising, with a subtle bass melody, lovely bell plinks, and a magnetic synth line, but it stays in place for the rest of its brief runtime. On “Overseas,” dippy lyrics about meeting up with a woman in Russia and joining the “mile-high club” on the plane ride stumble into a clip of comedian Zach Fox imitating an airline captain—funny, but not necessarily compelling.

Singer Michael McDonald, who collaborated with Bruner and Kenny Loggins on 2017’s gleaming “Show You The Way,” recently told the New York Times that Bruner reminds him of Steely Dan’s Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, who were “Top 40 radio darlings” but also had songs that were “so strange, and so sophisticated.” Here, Bruner has the attitude and the aptitude, but he’s mostly missing the songs.

“Fair Chance” comes close, with its weightless keyboards, gentle drums, and heartbroken hook about loving someone even though they’re not around—a reference to the late rapper Mac Miller, with whom Bruner was extremely close. But despite its sincerity and strong guest spot from Ty Dolla $ign, the song slides off the rails when a well-intentioned (but struggling) Lil B warbles out a shaky final verse. “Black Qualls” cooks along with a groove featuring ’80s boogie figurehead Steve Arrington, but loses its momentum midway through.

Then there’s “Dragonball Durag,” the most effortless song here. Over a breezy beat featuring a billowing saxophone provided by longtime friend and collaborator Kamasi Washington, Bruner sings playfully to a girl about his silky headscarf. It’s undeniably silly (“I may be covered in cat hair, but I still smell good,” he purrs) but also feels complete, one of those moments where Bruner’s goofiness complements his musical prowess. There’s evidence to suggest he can do this when he wants; there’s also plenty to suggest the contrary.

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/thundercat-it-is-what-it-is/

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NEW SONG THING

I haven’t posted my own music on here in quite some time, but that doesn’t mean I’ve stopped working on it. It’s sort-of become my sacred little hobby that I can do on my own time with no one watching.

With that said, here’s a post about my music (lol). I put a lot of time into this one, though. I wanted one well-thought-out track I could put on streaming and be proud of. I’ve been on a house kick for years now, most recently the likes of Kerri Chandler and Andres, and I love the warmth of sample-based dance music (”deep house”). I tried my hand at it here and then got it mixed and mastered at Brewery Studios up in Williamsburg. 

[flyrtreynolds]

POP SMOKE (RIP) ALBUM REVIEW (7.3/10)

You couldn’t get far in Brooklyn last summer without hearing Pop Smoke’s “Welcome to the Party.” The Canarsie MC’s window-quaking single gave the borough a bonafide hit and signified the arrival of its burgeoning drill scene on the charts. Much of the excitement stemmed from Pop’s alpha-dog charisma, manifested in a voice that sounds like he gargles gravel every morning. His swagger has only grown since then; he’s already proclaimed himself the king of New York on record despite being a total unknown before last year.

The 20-year-old has managed to back it all up thus far; he dropped a thrilling debut in July and its follow-up, Meet the Woo 2, provides more gritty drill music you can clench your jaw to. It all sort of sounds like “Party,” but it gets over on sheer maximalism like its predecessor did, with just enough deft touches to keep things exciting.

A perfect example of this is the opener “Invincible,” a fierce slab of bravado over a teetering violin beat. With his gruff bark, Pop paints himself as a warrior à la 300, except he’s marching through a room full of unfamiliar dudes somewhere deep in Brooklyn. As with most of his work, the song contains a few shaky lines (“I’m feeling horny, and I shoot like Robert Horry” stands out here), but Pop’s lyrics aren’t built for close inspection; they work best hurling out of a big speaker system.

He says as much himself on the following track, a collaboration with Migos frontman Quavo, when he threatens on the chorus, “How about I shake the room?” The song’s heavy beat, supplied by “Party” producer 808Melo, demonstrates the UK beatmaker’s sonic growth; a soft vocal sample and a swerving bass line fill space more subtly than the brazen bass hits of their breakthrough. The energy is more haunting and meditative than the the white-knuckle ride of Vol. 1.

But it’s all centered around aggression, of course. On his verses, Pop usually can be heard asking some poor soul to take things outside or threatening more sinister acts of violence, like on “Christopher Walking,” when he declares that he’s going to “tie that boy up like a cowboy.” His grim boasts are usually delivered without wit, but Pop’s bluntness occasionally leads to slivers of humor, as on “Get Back,” where a judge snaps, “Why you actin’ like a dick?” at him.

Meet the Woo 2 starts to slow on the back half, which is made up of more bare-bone instrumentals, as well as material that’s already been released, including, inexplicably, “Dior,” a single off Vol. 1. Pop’s voice holds more than enough weight to carry a track, but he operates at one breakneck speed, never adding much variance to his flow. Thus his songs typically need something—a melodic layer, a unique bassline—or they start to bleed together. That’s the case with songs like “Mannequin,” which is fabricated around a paper-thin sample and runs out of momentum midway through, and “Dreaming,” a song that’s almost entirely low end with no hint of a melody.

Pop’s detractors on social media often point out how his songs sound too sparse or similar. But if they were to step outside in NYC, chances are they’d encounter a car nearly rattling its rims off with his music. That means the drums and bass will continue to sit high in the mix, his flow will remain militant. For the most part, the recipe still works brilliantly.

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pop-smoke-meet-the-woo-vol-2/

[flyrtreynolds]

070 SHAKE ALBUM REVIEW (7.3/10)

The best moment from Kanye West’s ye, his much-maligned album from 2018, was crafted by 070 Shake. The 22-year-old singer’s chest-thumping appearance on “Ghost Town” was a glimmer of promise amid a heap of sloppy, single-take recordings, one of the few times on the album actually seemed transcendent. Her debut, Modus Vivendi, proves our ears weren’t deceiving us. The album is intensely sincere, with the New Jersey native proudly serving her soul raw atop bullish, beautiful production. It is the most compelling and complete release under G.O.O.D. Music since Pusha T’s Daytona.

The heavy-hearted vibes begin immediately on the opener, “Don’t Break The Silence.” Shake’s ambered voice rises over a floating synth and describes a lover who isn’t quite ready to break things off. “If you were liquid, you’d be bitter like wine/Till then I’ma drink, stay here for the ride,” she hums out. The feelings of desire, being desired, and all the messiness in between are at the center of Modus Vivendi, a Latin term used to describe an arrangement between two conflicting parties in the hopes of coexisting peacefully. For Shake, that harmony is elusive, not only in her relationships with women but also in her own heart. On “Terminal B,” she grapples with whether the warm feelings of a relationship can be trusted, poking at it like it’s too good to be true. “Yeah baby, she’s on lockdown love,” she murmurs before immediately second-guessing herself: “Maybe she is not down.”

All this heaviness is packaged neatly within bright melodies built for lovesick kids to belt out at Coachella and Rolling Loud. This gives her songs a tone of triumph and catharsis rather than total defeat, like on the hook for “Morrow,” where she dejectedly lets a partner know, “I don’t know if I’ll be here tomorrow,” but stretches out the last word in snappy fragments, similar to Rihanna’s ad-libs on “Umbrella.” She goes for a higher register on “Come Around,” where she cries out for someone to join her in her loneliness, like she’s trapped at the bottom of a well, yelling at a sliver of sky.

The elasticity of her voice isn’t always utilized properly here, perhaps the result of too much experimentation in the studio. On a few tracks, she ventures too far into trap-rap territory, dumbing her voice down to a mumbled delivery, like on “Rocketship,” which could serve as a Travis Scott reference track in how similar it is to his auto-tuned sound. She dips heavily into voice modulation on the album as a whole, recently telling Pitchfork that this was done to make her sound “more real.” In actuality, it achieves the opposite effect, creating a degree of separation between her in and the listener by placing a governor on the amount of emotion she conveys. At times, you find yourself yearning for her voice to be left more naked and vulnerable.

These are largely the only missteps on an otherwise richly produced album. Modus is essentially the antithesis of the half-baked works that arose from Kanye’s Wyoming sessions in 2018. It is the result of a handful of talented collaborators who provide enough eclecticism to balance out the bombastic sound of G.O.O.D. in-house producer Mike Dean. For every “Come Around” built on the same roaring synths Dean supplied for Yeezus, there’s an infectious ’80s-inspired jam like “Guilty Conscience.” “The Pines,” meanwhile, is constructed on a distorted chant similar to the one played out on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy switch-up “Hell Of A Life,” but finishes with a thunderous string arrangement, giving Dean’s sound some refreshing variance.

The most inspired works, though, come from former Stills member Dave Hamelin, who gives Shake ethereal, dreamy soundscapes to navigate through, none more pretty than the closer “Flight319.” Over astral chords that conjure images of misty daybreak, Shake encapsulates her internal tug of war by alternating between lines of confidence and shame, optimism and fear. Eventually, the drums cut out and she hits a point of reflection: “Oh, I’ll never know, how long I’ll stay, how far I’ll go.” Everything is in agreement, even if it’s just for a moment.

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/070-shake-modus-vivendi/

[flyrtreynolds]

DAI BURGER ALBUM REVIEW (6.7/10)

Queens rapper Dai Burger got her start as a background dancer for rappers like Lil Mama, but since then she’s become a fixture at queer parties around Brooklyn. Her new album, Bite the Burger, continues the evolution of her lascivious sound—foul-mouthed, sex-positive lyrics over thrumming production that pulls from Baltimore club and trap. It’s raucous and it’s fun, but some of the most promising moments are the quieter ones, when Dai’s songwriting chops are given space to blossom.

The biggest example here is “Miss Me,” a slow-burning ballad built around a hissing AutoTuned chant. Dai bounces between singing and rapping, delivering reassurances like “The bullshit made me who I am today” before complicating that pride with petty jabs at exes: “You should miss me, wanna kiss me.” Later on “Pics (Interlude),” a wispy and playful jam about the regret that comes with sending nudes, she issues a blithe, baby-voiced warning: “Don’t leak my shits/Cause if you do, I promise you, I’m going to leak your shits.”

Her ability to both sing and rap, along with her Queens accent and the fact that women MCs are hardly ever allowed to stand on their own, is bound to bring up Nicki Minaj comparisons. But where Nicki’s lyrics are often devoted to her singular place in the spotlight, Dai’s are more illustrative of the people around her, whether it’s friends on the dancefloor or lovers in bed. “The Function,” for example, is a ’90s-style house anthem for the club’s most bold and beautiful, complete with cheesy trance synths. On “Urz,” she giddily dives into the benefits of having a down-low lover, confessing, “We be on that sneaky shit, but it’s better off that way/I just keep you on a shelf, call you down when I wanna play.” The track also stands as a showcase of Dai’s knack for describing sexual encounters in hilariously creative ways, none better than the line, “Playing with this pussy like it’s Ableton.”

Dai’s sexuality has always been at the center of her work, unapologetically divulging the juicy details of past relationships and flings. She wields it like a weapon on the album single “Vitamin P,” using the chorus to clearly outline what the “P” in the title stands for: “P for pussy, P for power, P for pride and prestige,” she growls. The line could serve as a thesis statement for all of her music.

But while much of Bite the Burger sizzles, there are moments that fall short, lyrics that don’t work hard enough. On the aforementioned “Miss Me,” an otherwise-stellar track kicks off with a dud when she hollowly boasts, “Couldn’t even walk a mile in my shoes, cause this shit so high you’re guaranteed to lose.” The verses on “5 Dubbz,” meanwhile, are almost endearing in their one-take quality, but start to stumble as Dai repeats herself: “You wouldn’t know love if it slapped you right in the face... You wouldn’t know love if it walked up and slapped you in your motherfucking face.”

And then there are the trap-leaning songs, like “I Be Knowin” and the title track, which rely on shaky keyboard melodies and plastic drums that sound like they were ripped from a YouTube tutorial. Placed aside the high-energy club-oriented tracks, which are thrilling in their influences from a wide range of dance music, they seem small and mundane. An artist as bold and honest as Dai should never sound so boring.

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dai-burger-bite-the-burger/

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KNXWLEDGE TAPE REVIEW (6.9/10)

Rappers loved bootlegging Glen Boothe’s beats, so he started bootlegging their raps. That’s the lore behind the Wraptaypes anthology, which Boothe (aka Knxwledge) started back in 2011 and of which he has dropped multiple installments every subsequent year. (It’s hard to tell how many, as he likes to put decimals points in the edition number, like last summer’s part 14.8). Each one combines lo-fi a capellas of songs and freestyles ripped from dollar-bin record finds and YouTube with burly sampled loops, sometimes barely altered beyond a degradation in fidelity or a few drum clicks.

WT_PRT15., his newest, is no different, dipping vocals from Jay-Z, UGK, and Young Thug into a gluey mixture of vintage horn riffs and soul croons. Some may view the formula as tired, but there are always moments of brilliance to catch you off-guard. Just as his beats start to lull, an entrancing melody, or a punchline that’s tee’d up dazzlingly off a sample, hits you square in the heart.

That moment comes fairly early on in PRT15. Wedged in between a pair of minute-long sketches sits “UGK[TAPE],” a repurposing of UGK and OutKast’s 2007 classic “Int’l Players Anthem (I Choose You).” The southern MCs are parachuted in over a bed of strings, a sample that sounds like it was plucked from the score of some 1940s MGM classic. Accentuating the strings, you can still sort-of hear the soaring vocals from the a capella’s original sample, Willie Hutch’s “I Choose You.” The track is over four minutes long, doesn’t include any changes in its song structure—just like all the other beats on the tape, the loop keeps looping—and yet remains mesmerizing.

Another high point comes on “freeallmynihgas,” a sprawling freestyle from an unnamed MC that sounds captured from a cell phone. Boothe takes this verse, a roll call of loved ones locked away, and sets it to a sprightly keyboard melody, giving it a near-musical theater quality. He pulls a similar move on the opener “shotgunvision,” pinning a gritty verse referencing ski-mask robberies and trapping from the sofa against a bright synth. In these moments, Boothe is reimagining not just songs, but moments in time, a method he’s been pursuing since his childhood in church, where he would record sermons on small cassette tapes and then chop them up on his Roland SP-303.

But not all the tracks on PRT15. justify their run times. A handful start to lose steam past the first few minutes, when the initial rush wears off. On “team [SRF],” for example, which reworks Young Thug’s So Much Fun highlight “Surf,” the bare-bones instrumental of guitar plucks and doo-wop hums is simply too sparse to keep things interesting, a bridge section stretched too far. Meanwhile, Boothe’s ghostly revision of Reasonable Doubt classic “Dead Presidents” is thrilling in its first moments, with its muffled carol choruses and croaking bass notes, but is too gooey to go four minutes without any sort of beat change or break.

This is par for the course when it comes to Wraptaypes, a series that finds Boothe hardly extending himself beyond his first strike of inspiration. It could explain why he can produce at such a prolific clip, cranking out numerous installments of other anthologies simultaneously, including an R&B vocals-based tape series and a Meek Mill-centered one. If an a capella and instrumental sound right on first alignment, he lets them take on a life of their own, leaving the door open for both imperfection and symmetry.

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/knxwledge-wt-prt15/

[flyrtreynolds]

WESTSIDE GUNN ALBUM REVIEW (7.3/10)

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo recently boasted that the Buffalo Bills are the only true-blue NY football team, as they’re the only one that actually plays in-state. (Both the Giants and Jets play in a stadium in New Jersey). Buffalo rapper Westside Gunn has been trumpeting a similar claim in the realm of rap, dubbing himself the “New King of New York” despite being from a city upstate that’s more known for its snowfall than hip-hop. But while MCs from the NYC boroughs have tried to shake the dust off their sound with trap hi-hats, Gunn and his Griselda Records cohorts have proudly embraced the loops and drum breaks of the city’s “Golden Age” and revamped them. So much so that the richest rapper to ever make it out of Brooklyn recently gave them a management deal.

On Hitler Wears Hermes 7, the formula doesn’t change, with Gunn rapping ruthlessly about life on the streets of Buffalo over glistening barely touched samples. With each edition of the series, the bars seem to get a little harder, the beats a little prettier, and Gunn’s persona comes further into focus. The project opens with DJ Drama, whose Gangsta Grillz mixtapes once served as proclamations of stardom for artists like Lil Wayne and Young Jeezy, decreeing that the “Buffalo kids done did it.” It’s a sentiment Gunn circles back to often on Hermes 7 with crass lines like, “First nigga in my city with a Rolls/Fuck two bad bitches at the Lowe’s,” injecting a conventional rap boast with some of his hometown’s blue-collar attitude.

Gunn’s voice is a nasally high-pitched yap, somewhere between Brooklyn rappers AZ and Troy Ave, and is perfectly tuned for talking shit. “At the Roc Nation brunch with my tool on, don’t disrespect us,” he cooly warns on “GONDEK.” Elsewhere, on “Connie’s Son,” he crows that he’s “made half at least half a mil’ ridin’ Mega buses,” a clever reference to the cheap bus service that’s been exposed more than once as a tool used by traffickers to run drugs across state lines. Griselda crew members Conway The Machine and Benny The Butcher show up to deliver equally gritty verses, as well as a surprisingly in-form Fat Joe, who harkens back to his DITC days on “Kelly’s Korner” by lamenting how he once got his hand put in a meat grinder for stealing a mafia Don’s car.

The production, handled by a who’s who of boom-bap aficionados like Alchemist, Statik Selektah and Griselda in-house producer Daringer, is as lovely as the lyrics are ugly. The swirling keys on “Broadway Jones” sound more like something jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi laid down for A Charlie Brown Christmas than a backdrop to an ode to cooking crack. The soaring vocal sample on the frontend of “Undertaker vs. Goldberg,” meanwhile, throws Gunn’s violent “doot, doot, doot, doot” adlibs into a warm swirl. The only moments the beats come up short are when their simplicity veers into redundancy, like a few minutes into “Undertaker,” which could have been bolstered by some drums.

This could be said for other aspects of Hermes 7 as well, a project that’s endearingly straightforward but has a firm ceiling as a result. By its midpoint, you pretty much know how each song will unfold, a one-note dish that’s tasty on first bite but starts to lose its flavor by the end. Make no mistake, this is who Westside Gunn is: He makes one kind of song and does it well. Putting out a niche product has ironically led him, along with the rest of Griselda Records, to a larger audience. But even recipes for success can be improved upon.

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/westside-gunn-hitler-wears-hermes-7/

[flyrtreynolds]

Pitchfork: Jaden, Pi’erre and Future

I’ve been slacking a bit on posting my work here, but I’ve been a busy boi. Earlier in the summer, I did three album reviews for Pitchfork...all of which I gave poor ratings toward (lol). It was unintentional, and I think most fans and critics agreed these projects weren’t the artists’ best works. You decide:

Jaden Smith -- ERYS: “The young polymath’s latest album is mostly a slog, the sound of an artist with a blurry vision and too many resources at his disposal.”

Pi’erre Bourne -- The Life of Pi’erre 4: “Playboi Carti’s go-to producer goes solo, crooning in AutoTune over his blissfully simple earworm beats.”

Future -- SAVE ME EP: “His latest EP proves he’s still a master of melancholic detail, but thematically and sonically, the Atlanta superstar has hit a wall.”

[flyrtreynolds]

Some more branded content for that ass. I wrote and helped produce this series for Hotels.com. Got to stay in some nice hotel suites in downtown L.A. during production, which was fun.