Uyama Hiroto-A son of the sun

Oh glorious, glorious beats
Japanese instrumental hip-hop, very much in the vein of Nujabes.

here

Flying Lotus - Cosmogramma

Flying Lotus, a.k.a. FlyLo, is a producer/"laptop" musician from Cali. After his first album 1983, he became known as one of the better hip-hop instrumental producers out there. Even before all that, he used to produce the music for AdultSwim's inter-show segments (not surprising seeing as how AS is obsessed with Dilla/DOOM and eclectic underground hip-hop). Cosmogramma is different because it's not entirely focused on hip-hop, but a myriad of genres. An interesting, experimental mix of ambient, IDM, jazz, trip-hop and more, Cosmogramma is a beautiful album and has immense replay value.

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toe - the book about my idle plot on a vague anxiety

This has quickly become my favourite toe album and one of my favourite albums of all time. There was a toe post here not too long ago (For Long Tomorrow) but I'm posting this band up here again. This is instrumental post-rock at its best, imo. Not to mention their drummer is bloody insane. You should get this, you'll love it, no matter what kind of music you're into.

Tracklist:

1. 反逆する風景

2. 孤独の発明

3. Tremolo+Delay

4. 向こう岸が視る夢

5. all I understand is that I don't understand

6. c

7. past and language

8. music for you

9. I do still wrong

10. メトロノーム

11. everything means nothing

download

buy (the cheapest you'll find online)

p.s. 孤独の発明 is just beautiful.

Double post: The Roots (Dilla Joints) + Bastard (No Hope In Here)

This is going to be a quick double feature since I'm leaving for New York in a couple of days and have a bunch of things to take care of. Let's get started.

First off, we have one of my favourite hip-hop acts covering songs by one of my favourite producers in the same genre. ?uestlove and co. have been covering the late J. Dilla's tracks for a while now and this right here is a compilation of the best ones. Absolutely sublime and very relaxing.

Download

P.S. If you like this, you should definitely buy the new Roots album. Real hip-hop is hard to come by in 2010 so it's really quite special.

On the other end of the spectrum we have BASTARD (so good it has to be written in block capitals), a Japanese hardcore band. I don't know if hardcore fans out there are familiar with the awesome power of Japanese hardcore but if you're not, BASTARD will be happy to provide a great introduction. Aggressive hardcore/crust for the most part, at times morphing into thrash and sometimes even catchy (le gasp). Cop this, you know you want to.

Download|Buy

mogwai

This is all I listened to last year. Literally.
young team
come on die young

Yann Tiersen

Man, oh man, Kylesa are one uber-fantastic band. Caught their gig in London yesterday, sound was super-tight, support bands were really good as well, including this one new band, Muswell. I asked them if I can post their EP, and they were pretty cool about it. So I'll give it a listen and should have a review handy by the end of the week.


Well, this isn't the sort of thing that you'd expect to find in such a blog, but I really do enjoy this album, so bear with me. Yann Tiersen comes up with some pretty interesting melodies and some very pleasing accordion parts in this record. Might sound a bit same-y to some, but fuck 'em, I like it. Also, Bruno was by far one of the worst comedies I've seen thus far in 2009.

dl