Every couple months in Los Angeles, a few thousand people have a quaint get together titled simply, “HARD“. It is here were they are entranced by the finest envoy of eclectic electro this side of the Mississippi. Well, unless HARD is on rotation in New York.
In LA, you get quite a few options at Halloween-time, ranging from low key to BA-BLAM. There are the neighborhood dives with drink specials and scary movies on the telly. There are the swanky clubs, the “balls”, the costume parties in the hills. There is the Hollywood Forever cemetery’s Dia de Los Muertos festivities, the spoooky Griffith Park hay rides, and the haunted houses, too. All this is well and good, but if you want to catch some serious Halloween spirit, the annual West Hollywod Carnaval the the ultimate in fun.
The Voodoo Experience had many rocking moments this past weekend. One to note was the afternoon set from innerpartysystem on the Le Plur stage. Sure the sun was high and bright in the sky, not your normal ambiance for electronic thumping. Yet the club crowd showed up in full force, heads bouncing, singing along.
No one could escape being called American Trash for at least a good 4 minutes. But the zealous fans kept calm and carried on. IPS had a little technical difficulty mid-set…but that was more the stages fault than the bands (I witnessed at least 4 other bands throughout the day having such issues). Despite the glitch, the band came back strong. Lead singer, Patrick Nissley, looks unassuming but I have to say, impressive, as he belted out his lyrics like “I am the life that you adore, I feed the rich and f!@k the poor”.
As part of AllHipHop’s goal to bring the fans closer to the artists, region by region, they are launching campaigns city by city to bring out as many artists in that specific region or city as we can to get exclusive content that no other website could bring you.
AllHipHop’s Dallas Red Carpet Welcoming Event featured guest appearances from Big Chief, Big Tuck, Bone, (Def Jam), B Hamp, Dorrough, Fat B, DJ Mike “5000” Watts, Play-N-Skillz, Treal Lee and Prince Rick (Mr. Collipark’s new artists), Slim Thug, Trae the Truth, Tum Tum, Young Black and their Texas Breeding Ground Artists Big Hud, Double A and Thugged Out. Most importantly they brought everyone out as planned, and kept the peace.
A few years ago, Brooklyn native and Kanye West collaborator, Talib Kweli did a brief stint on tour in China. Accompanying him were an eclectic band of heathens who’s engraving on the plate of their 2 Grammys reads, “Ozomatli.” As close quarters living oft goes, that mangle of musical madness sparked a friendship which has culminated into the battle of beats before me, better know as Red Bull’s Sound Clash.
The School of Seven Bells’ Ben Curtis said it best when rattling off a list of inspirations: in so many words, Silver Apples was the band that was doing some of the most progressive and radical things in music, and decades ahead of bands that pride themselves on being so ingenuous nowadays. They were one of those groups that successfully wove together elements of hippie, flower-power music, psychedelia, Moody Blues-esque, symphonic prog-rock.
And just to throw you off, there’s some random samples from commercials and shows and dead phone lines as well thrown into that mix, if for no other reason than to simply drive you mad and confirm with absolute certainty that there has never been, and will never be, a band like Silver Apples. As the group’s sole composer, New Orleans-born Simeon Coxe III says, “They didn’t have any synthesizers, so I had to make one.”
He did — mostly out of spare parts laying around, McGuyver-style.He’s worth checking out now on Red Bull Music Academy Radio, if only to hear reminisce on the days before there were Ensoniqs or Korg Workstations and this guy had to build it out of nothing. Coxe eventually picked up and moved to the NYC. And after witnessing Dave Bartholemew and Fats Domino live in concert at the tender young age of 15, Coxe was For English buffs like me, haha, the band’s name is based on The Song of the Wandering Aengus by William Butler Yeats.