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Tesla55 – It’s You (Bishiclet Remix)

Wednesday, February 11, 2015

bischimpt

Everyone wants to make music, but nobody wants to learn their notes. Everyone wants six-pack abs and to be in super shape, yet no one wants to work out for three hours at the gym daily. Everyone wants to play basketball, but no one wants to spend their summers in basketball camp while all of their friends are partying. My point? People want and feel that they can do every single thing better than others, but have zero foundation, or any real knowledge of what to do to get there.

Sure, it’s super easy to critique something that exists when you see it because you have no idea what it took to get it there, so yes, of course you think you can make it better. The fact of the matter remains that you cannot. You can’t tell someone what is wrong with their music if you don’t know notes, progressions, the theory of voice leading, how balance in mixing works and why. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg amongst various other factors that exist in order to do so, as well.

Instead, we give you the best of the best because you rely on us to do so. I mean, who has time to sift through thousands of submissions a day and find something that will resonate with the masses? And even then, nine times out of ten, we’re looking for stuff that’s going to resonate with the tastemakers and not the masses. You know, the guys and gals who affect the opinions of the stars and bloggers you follow. That’s right because even the influencers to you have influencers to them, and somewhere in that totem pole of music, near the very top, is where we sit.

So here we are again today, supplying you guys with the daily dosage of sonic antioxidants and steroids for your workouts, pre-game festivities, or simple pre happy hour jolt in form of a Bishiclet Remix to Tesla55’s “It’s You“. It’s quite the afternoon rush to get you psyched for the last few hours of your nine to fives, if anyone still even has any of those, and it’s a delicious little electro dance/deep house soundbite otherwise if anyone is cutting school, work, or even life and hooky jamming it up on this beautiful American afternoon.

Life is too short for all that work noise anyway.

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Slow Magic – Waited 4 U (ODESZA Remix)

Tuesday, February 10, 2015

ODESZA re-vamped Slow Magic’s original “Waited 4 U”, adding several layers of interesting sounds to the mix. The original is mellow, with the focus primarily on the minimality of the keyboard and pulsating sounds of the steady percussion. It’s very inconspicuous.. then comes along ODESZA, and the song itself yells, “Listen to me! I’m more than a chill background setting! I waited for YOU!”

I, for one, am enthralled by the transformation. There’s a lot more life in this track. Even though only 4 words are sung throughout, I really feel them in this version of the song; I can feel the pain in his voice. It also sticks to the inside of my eardrums. Earlier today I’d been listening to it, went to lunch, and found myself whistling the melody!

Slow Magic has produced two albums, the most recent of which I’ve given a proper listen. “Girls” was the first track to capture my attention. If you’re into Chrome Sparks or MMOTHS, it will be worth your while to pursue Slow Magic. Happy listening!

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Joey Bada$$ – Piece of Mind

Monday, February 9, 2015

What’s life like now trying to figure out…”

Piece of Mind, my favorite Joey Bada$$ song of the moment starts off like that and it couldn’t be more appropriate with my ever-changing, forever growing wonder with life. I’ve been on earth in the physical form for 30 years and not a day goes by when I’m not in utter amazement at what an incredibly mysterious place this is. I watched the night turn to day on Saturday morning, up on my friends rooftop I saw the moon fade into the abyss while the almighty sun rose in all it’s grandeur. The colors of the sky changing and morphing in a way no description or picture could come anywhere close to capturing, it was surreal. As humans we’re so self-centered but that dawn I realized we’re not even close to the most interesting thing happening on earth. I mean we’re a part of that amazement but we separate ourselves because we’re self-centered. What’s even wilder is that we haven’t even fully developed the senses to fully perceive the world around us. That night I realized I know longer want to know, I want to wonder…

And what’s life like for me? It’s but a dream
Everything ain’t what it seems, up underneath
The surface is but a screen,
we only see what we know…”

We’re obsessed with certainty, its human nature to constantly want to acquire knowledge, grow and explore but are we even capable of understanding and learning what really going in the way we’ve been going about it? Can our eyes truly see the world around us as it is, are they the right tool for the job? Maybe it’s the third eye. We look at the world through programming as it is so how can we possibly wonder or embrace the mystery of this magical place while wearing these cultural and psychological blinders?

I really don’t know the answer to those questions but I think it has something to do with the imagination. Reason, logic, philosophy and all those human made tools are too limited, you really have to open your mind to something else. In this abstract way watching the sky go from night to day is such a majestic and beautiful way made me feel like there’s no reason for me to remain the same. If I die and my mind hasn’t evolved to Space Age levels then I’ve wasted my potential,

Bet next time you see us, we gonna be our best…”

This track puts me back in that mornings zone, where just looking at the massive sky was so much more mind-blowing, interesting and captivating than scrolling through a tumblr on Intstagram picture. It was simply too big and powerful for the iPhone, which in itself is a marvel. Peter Thiel talks about the power law, earthly things we obsess over have nothing on the creativity of our planet. Enjoy.

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Summer Heart — Beat of Your Heart

Saturday, February 7, 2015

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Funk them Winter Blues!

Beat of Your Heart comes to us all the way from Göteborg, Sweden to smack the icicles away and warm up our souls with it’s echoey beach-y weather sound. It turns out that in reading Michael Paul Stavrou’s Mixing With Your Mind, one comes to realize that songs like this one by Summer Heart are echoes of sounds gone from eras past. Basically, you get this Beach Boys vibe because that’s what the artist(s) wants you to hear. Maybe they remember a time when they were in their parents cars listening to the radio and could hear songs that sounded like this. Radio has always naturally compressed so many sounds, hence the lo-fi feel that you get here with Beat of Your Heart. The vocals sit louder and echo through the maze of synth waves and sounds that make up the instrumentation. But here, we get a little more…

Normally when listening to lo-fi music we don’t get the pleasure of experiencing the bass or mids as well as Summer Heart has done here, so what we get, in my opinion, is a super cool artistic interpretation of what a Space Age set of Beach Boy songs should sound like in the year 2155 because by then cars will DEFINITELY come equipped with subs, right?

Enjoy this chill and groovy masterpiece of summertime magic as you get ready for brunch today because it will provide you with the exact mind frame you will require in order to have a nuclear day and forget them foolish old winter blues. The swing of the song is just enough to get you dancing in place, whether sitting or standing, and at your desk or in the shower, so play it loudly and play it proudly.

Oh, and before I forget: bop your head too because it’s fun to see people do it when they are enjoying the shit out of a song regardless of who is around.

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Libérez-vous

Friday, February 6, 2015

third eye

Si vous êtes pris dans le rêve de l’autre; vous êtez foutus.

If you’re trapped in the dream of the Other, you’re fucked.

-Gilles Deleuze, Thousand Plateaus

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EXGF – We Are The Hearts (Premiere)

Tuesday, February 3, 2015

We Are The Hearts…

Have you ever denied yourself the opportunity to make the right decision? i.e. You know shouldn’t take a job for the money, you know the person you’re with isn’t right for you, but you do it anyway, you carry on for the wrong reasons. What makes us so reluctant to choosing our nobler influences and why are we ruled by habitual vices, weak to our desires?

Those are tough questions but often times it’s our own ego hidden in the form of intellect that gives credence to our ego supported qualities. The intellect is nothing more than a middle man who creates an imaginary barrier between the finite self and the infinite. It serves a purpose, but it’s only good a pointing out what’s wrong and what’s missing and leaves you hanging without offering a solution. Want to sell something to people? Appeal to their intellect and take away their power, make them feel as if they are missing something and then sell it back to you in the form of something material…

No point in getting upset about the unknown. Only suckers do that.” A hustler has to deal with danger and risk. It’s part of the game. You cannot control it all, nor would you want to. Chaos, unknown factors are not something to be anxious about. They represent opportunities for new angles, new hustles. The sucker cannot stand the unknown and so either fouls up by getting impatient and over anxious, or retreats to a false world of security and the known.” – Iceberg Slim

So no, intellect will not set you free, tapping into the infinite requires freedom from the shackles of thought. What do Space Age kids do to middle men? We get rid of them because as above so below, the finite and the infinite are one and the same and we must free ourselves of anything that gets in the way of that truth. Everything we need, all the resources of ultimate creative power are already within us. The intellect can’t comprehend that because it’s beyond thought – what’s a God to a non-believer?

This is what I mean by freedom, giving free play to all the creative and benevolent impulses inherently lying in our hearts. Generally, we are blind to this fact, that we are in possession of all the necessary faculties that will make us happy and loving towards one another. All the struggles that we see around us come from this ignorance… When the cloud of ignorance disappears… we see for the first time into the nature of our own being.” – D.T. Suzuki

WE ARE THE HEARTS

My affection for that phrase is not a thought, it’s a feeling that taps far beyond I could express in words. It’s the feeling that has changed the world time after time for better or worse. The feeling that frees us from the tyranny of intellect and makes a person believe in themselves and their power to create. This song captures a passing moment of sadness and defeat as it’s becoming hope and motivation for triumph. Down but not out you dig deep and find the meaning of your struggle…

The more you suffer the deeper grows your character, and with the deepening of your character you read the more penetratingly into the secrets of life. All great artists, all great religious leaders, and all great social reformers have come out of the intensest struggles which they fought bravely, quite frequently in tears and with bleeding hearts.”

EXGF returns with a song that is not about intellect, it’s about heart. Not about raising questions and finding what’s missing but about embracing the mystery and opening up to the power of creation within us. It’s a song about people who don’t give up and do everything in their power to fight back…

To make you feel what I feel I’m try my best
And if you real like I’m real, you could provide the rest
Everything left out, you could blame it on the brain not the heart, I’m playing my part…” – Memphis Bleek

EXGF is an anomaly but it doesn’t matter because in the end great art will outlive artists. That might be a novel concept in this modern age of selfies and instant gratification but there’s no greater accomplishment as an artist than to have the work become bigger than the creator. As we slowly put together the mystery behind EXGF you start to find these nobler influences overwhelmingly present in their work. EMPT speaks that Don language, enjoy.

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Oh Wonder — Lose It

Sunday, February 1, 2015

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The theory for some time has been that with all these new streaming services and no more need to buy individual songs for $1.29 and download them into your computers to simply take up space, that a lot more artists would be heard. But that hasn’t necessarily been true. Music still remains a game for the elite, and that isn’t always the most fair game to play. By elite I mean those that study it, those that live and breathe it, and those that find their sounds progressing at rates that some others may not. Sometimes this happens organically, but most of the time these people come from backgrounds that afford them these advantages like family members that have some sort of background in music, or playing and singing from an early age while learning notes and musical theory, or, interning for one of the greatest producers or mix engineers in the game to get a hold of sounds that the average kid who wants to produce will probably never have.

And then there is the good music that will always find its way to the top, and that’s what it seems like we are getting, over-and-over, with Oh Wonder. Their latest release put out this morning is titled Lose It, and it’s another beautiful sonic gem.

My own personal theory is that more and more, as plenty of new music continues to flood the web waves, only the really good music will resonate, and by really good music I’m talking about bringing back the days of live instruments being recorded and mixed in a way where we will feel that we are right in the room with all the session players, and all the vocalists. That’s the kind of music that will see itself quickly spread, shared and loved by millions.

Downtown we let it go
Sunset high and our bodies low
Blood rush in the hazy glow
My hands, your bones

Loose up we break the scene
One step deep as you fall to me
Heart clap, we skip a beat
Count one two three

And don’t you stop the music
Get into it
Won’t you dance with me?

Find a space and lose it
You can do it
Won’t you dance with me?

Move your feet and feel it in the space between
You gotta give yourself a moment, let your body be
We gotta lose it
We gotta lose it

Your name I’ll never know
As we get down in the world below
Caught up in an overflow
My hands, your bones

Wide eyed, you look at me
Set on fire in a silver dream
Spin round you can feel the breeze
Count one, two, three

And don’t you stop the music
Get into it
Won’t you dance with me?

Find a space and lose it
You can do it
Won’t you dance with me?

Move your feet and feel it in the space between
You gotta give yourself a moment, let your body be
We gotta lose it
We gotta lose it

Make a spark, break the dark
Find a light with me
Who we are from the start
Won’t you dance with me?

Make a spark, break the dark
Find a light with me
Who we are chasing stars
Won’t you dance with me?

And don’t you stop the music
Get into it
Won’t you dance with me?

Find a space and lose it
You can do it
Won’t you dance with me?

Move your feet and feel it in the space between
You gotta give yourself a moment, let your body be
We gotta lose it

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EMPT Exclusive: Countryclub – Woods

Friday, January 30, 2015

I first met Lauren Musacchio when we worked together at Rolling Stone. She came into the studio before Elle Goulding was scheduled to perform, sat down at the piano and started singing. Then a dude from the art department wandered in and picked up a guitar and started to play. The two of them sang and played until the ubiquitous entourage of assistants and stylists came and took over the space. Now fast forward a few years later and Lauren has her own band and new single…and is well on her way to having her own entourage. Lauren Musacchio and Dan Cohen have formed Countryclub— a memorable sound that might be likened to eavesdropping on a secret conversation from which you simply can’t turn away from. The EP is being produced & mixed by David Sisko (remixed // Ninjasonik, Roxy Music, Au Revoir Simone, Goldfrapp, Cut Copy) Countryclub is currently completing a video for Woods and will be announcing a vinyl/digital EP release date early 2015.

The only thing more inspiring than seeing a friend chase their dream is seeing it all come true. Take a listen below and remember- you are the ruler to your kingdom! The world is yours, do what you love.

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We are the mirror as well as the face in it.

Thursday, January 29, 2015

galaxylovers

Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere.
They’re in each other all along.

We are the mirror as well as the face in it.
We are tasting the taste this minute of eternity. We are pain
and what cures pain, both. We are
the sweet cold water and the jar that pours.

I want to hold you close like a lute,
so we can cry out with loving.

You would rather throw stones at a mirror?
I am your mirror, and here are the stones.

― Rumi

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Banquise — Paintings and Paper

Wednesday, January 28, 2015

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For many of you out there 2015 will represent a moment of reflection in your lives. It will be the year that your souls get away from the norm and travel to far away lands. Maybe you’re heading to college across the country or somewhere around the globe. Maybe you are following love to lands you have never even heard of, or maybe you’re just taking a break to islands unnoticed, and riding trains barely ever seen. Whatever the case may be, and wherever you may find yourself in 2015 this new tune titled “Paintings and Paper” from Banquise will be the right fit for those days when you decide to wander in your new surroundings, and just take the sites in.

A smooth, unassuming entry into your ears begins this electro-pop treat off as we find ourselves in awe of all the new places our eyes are seeing. Beautiful restaurants in Paris, the old stone buildings of London, the countrysides of India as the tea sellers yell out: ‘Chai, chai, garam chai’. Paintings and Paper is the soundtrack to beauty and our ability to imagine just about any story we wish to imagine while our souls are off on these foreign adventures. It maintains a velveteen softness in its instrumentation that makes it easy to follow and even easier to appreciate.

When music can whisk us off into another place while we sit right here in the snow and type away, well then that is music worth sharing; think diamond studded earrings made of sound.

I hope you enjoy this little piece of a magical getaway, and if you are off somewhere in the world out there outside of your norm, then definitely give this one a listen as you venture off into the unknown.

And I’ve drawn from the sky to the sea,
Woman’s face and sunny tree.
Searching forever.
Twisted minds will make me, lost and gone but hopefully…”

 

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