Music Landstrumm Lands

June 5, 2009 - 3:20 pm

Neil Landstrumm Photo Gallery

It’s not like we love Neil Landstrumm — it’s like the man lives inside of our ear drums, pounding out his innovative, hybrid cocktail of dub and grime powered auditory awesomeness. His Sunday set at Movement ’09 was certainly no exception. Although the poor dude was set up to the side of the stage, he made up for his lack of strategic positioning that lives in the world kick snare, kick snare — but stands tall in an ocean of imitators who chase his sound but continually fall flat. When you’ve been it for as long as Landstrumm has, you’ll run it into that … but you’ll also learn how to run directly over it, reverse and repeat a few times until you stand adjacent to only your own legacy and a long line of DJ road kill. For what seemed like an eternity (but was probably closer to an hour if we settle down and face the facts), Landstrumm transformed his daytime set into a time bending performance that turned the audience into midnight marauders of the sexist sort, Landstrumm’s often space age slugtone beats unleashing some of the weirdest, most sensual dance moves we’ve seen in quite sometime.

Words by Ryan Patrick Hooper, photos by Joe Gall

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Event Music Sweet and Sticky: Bassnectar Delivers the Juice

June 5, 2009 - 3:08 pm

Bassnectar at Red Bull Music Academy

Whether you were grinding along with the heaps of patrons in the audience, sacrificing your drinks to the Gods above in the VIP lounge or planted on boxes of gear backstage, everyone was smothered in a sticky, relentless coating of thundering bass as Bassnectar closed the Red Bull Music Academy stage on Monday night. Unleashing his Whip-It brand bass lines (imagine those adolescent wah-wahs magnified by a million) and eclectic dub step to new wave mash up style and you’ve got a good reason why the majority of the independent vendors were shut down as the sun set and the more hair than flare DJ took to the stage — who would want to miss it? But Bassnectar’s set wasn’t without complication as Lorin Ashton, the California-based multi-instrumentalist behind the name, is quick to point out.

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Music The Rhythm & Wisdom of Afrika Bambaataa

June 5, 2009 - 3:08 pm

Africa Bambaataa Interview

A wise man once said, “The biggest crime when [Afrika] Bambaataa plays is not to dance.” Actually, King Kurmanji, the international spokesperson for the Zulu Nation and Bambaataa’s right hand man, said that a few hours before Bambaataa’s set on the Red Bull Music Academy stage on Monday afternoon in a hotel lobby when he was actually on the right hand side of Bambaataa, firmly planted in a rather comfy chair. “When you dance, you lose your stresses and your worries,” continues Kurmanji. “You wash that negativity away when you release it, breathe it and move that behind.” Heavy words that are certainly not to be taken lightly — just like the political persona that Bambaataa encompasses in his large frame, and just like the cameo-packed performance he brought to the stage. “We just don’t want any wallflowers,” coolly adds Bambaataa.

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Music Busy P & the Art of Electro-Boutique

June 4, 2009 - 10:11 am

Busy P Live

Musicians carry a fraction of diva within their core. It is one of those unwritten laws that no matter how down to earth (or buried within) they may seem, there resides a chunk of entitlement in their bones that screams “gimme this” or “double wrap that.” As long as we don’t have to endure it constantly (read: be Kanye West’s personal assistant), it’s easy to push on the back burner and let it cook — considering it slightly, but never holding such pretenses against the artist. Busy P broke these rules on Monday evening when he slammed his designer headphones (and then his microphone) at the beginning of his set when something went wrong with the sound, and proceeded to scream in a mixture of French and English at the crowd and also at that poor, unfortunate sound guy (who seemed relatively unaffected by the whole ordeal).

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Music VJ Culture Mixes the Movies in My Mind

June 3, 2009 - 11:33 am

VJ Culture Video Jockey

As the sun shined through the massive square windows of a downtown Detroit hotel on Memorial Day, Grant Davis, aka VJ Culture,  is picking his way through a “delicious” vegetarian meatloaf. In the true nature of his role as one of the most sought after video jockeys in the game, he is quick to use nutritional visuals to describe (somewhat abstractly) how his job works. “The broccoli connects the wires to the meatloaf, which is the screen,” laughs Davis, “and here is me” — pointing to the mashed potatoes with his fork — “feeling a little mashed after last night.”

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Music Kevin Saunderson: Triple Blessed

June 2, 2009 - 10:22 am

Kevin Saunderson Saves Movement

Anyone who loves techno owes Kevin Saunderson for three things: co-inventing techno, coming up with the anthems, Big Fun and The Good Life, and being the unsung hero of Movement, stepping in at considerable cost to save the festival when its future was bleak.

The year was 2004, and the festival, which had been free to the public for the first four years, was in deep trouble. The city approached Saunderson, a well-liked presence in the Detroit community, and begged him to come in and take charge. “I had never run a festival before, but I knew how much time it would take to do it  right. So I agreed on the condition that they officially back the festival by September,” he says.

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Music The Human Nature of RJD2

June 2, 2009 - 10:20 am

RJD2

Everyone and their furry boots were ready for RJD2 on Sunday afternoon as the sun began to set on the second day of Movement ’09. With a stack of records cleanly categorized behind the turntable traditionalist, RJD2 quickly shuffled through his funk, soul and lightly rock ‘n’ rollified collection of tracks — pulling heavily from fan favorite albums Deadringer and Since We Last Spoke — smoothly worked up the crowd with his charismatic microphone moxy. “So, what do you guys want to do now?” jokingly inquired RJD2 halfway through his set. “Should we just go home?” And, like sweaty clockwork, the droves of funk frenzied fans declared, “No!” in what seemed like perfect unison. “Let’s get to work then,” quipped the man with the plan before mashing up The Cars’ classic Let The Good Times Roll with his own hip-hop influenced creation of distorted guitars and bouncing beats.

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Music The Perfect Storm: Z-Trip Takes Detroit

June 1, 2009 - 8:51 am

Z-Trip Interview

Zach Sciacca, better known as Z-Trip, founder of the mash-up and one of America’s most influential DJs, is stoked. In less than an hour, he will walk on to the Red Bull Music Academy’s stage of Movement. Although a fixture at festivals like Bonnaroo and Coachella, he’s never played this one. And he can’t wait to get it started. “Musically,” he says, “you can get away with murder in Detroit. They are so enlightened here that you can play whatever you want and they’ll go along with you.”

But before he goes on, there’s an interview to do. An intensely political person, he had talked last summer, at Electric Daisy Carnival, Los Angeles’ big summer rave, about the election, whose outcome was not yet a foregone conclusion, and how nervous he had been about the outcome. This time around, I wondered if he seen the trickle-down effects of hope filter into cities like Detroit yet.

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Music FlyLo But Aim High

May 29, 2009 - 11:46 am


Forget J-Lo. There’s a new kid in town called Flying Lotus or, to his fans, FlyLo. In the past several years, Flying Lotus, whose real name is Stephen Ellison, has won accolades for his first album, 2006′s 1983, and last year’s Los Angeles, released by prestigious Warp Records.

That’s not a bad beginning for someone whose work is virtually impossible to classify. Ironically, he has as much trouble labeling it as anyone else. When pressed, he comes up with the term, psychedelic beats. When that draws blank stares, he refines it with “hip-hop rooted in psychedelic rock.”

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