The Witzard

Haj of dumhi tells us he's been working on Shanti's Rebuttal on-and-off for about two years. We briefly spoke with Haj about Shanti's Rebuttal during our 2020 wrap-up style interview earlier this year. The majority of his beats were completed pre-COVID, but when COVID-19 hit, Haj started working on his 2020 projects with FERMENTED SPIRITS and Charles Only/ShamelessPlug. Some of the beats from Shanti's (and some from 2019's TERiYAKi HAiR.PIECE ) wound up being a part of the 2020 project The Airing of Grievances with Reef The Lost Cauze. Initially, Haj intended to put Shanti's Rebuttal out as an instrumental companion piece to Grievances shortly thereafter, but, then, he started working on video collages and more artwork, etc. the music, also, evolved a little bit. It's about 18 minutes long and is intended to be experienced as one continuous piece of music; an Instrumental Hip-Hop soundtrack, of sorts. Its basic plot involves an unwitting heroine who wind...

dumhi ORIGIN STORY: I started making beats around 2002, I guess. I had no intention of doing anything with it, except having fun. At that point, I, personally, knew no one that did music stuff. 2003-ish to 2005, I started meeting some other folks who did music in various capacities like Shameless Plug/Charles Only, Flud, Mash Comp/Wise, MicheleQJ. A lot of us met through sharing demos and talking sh*t on okayplayer.com. That was such a great place to meet [people,] at the time. A lot of [people] were on there, also, just starting their music and learning and we were all hype to talk to each other about it. This is where I met the Tanya Morgan guys and E L U C I D and I used to send my horrible early beats to Nicolay [The Foreign Exchange], via AOL Instant Messenger and we would sit there doing stuff like that until 3:00am every night. Then, on the weekends, I would get up with Plug, Flud, Mash, and whoever else might be around and we'd drink and make jokes and make songs. I, ...

CREDIT: Unknown Artist (SOURCE: r/mfdoom) Honestly, it doesn't even feel like there's a proper way to elegize an eccentric and extremely talented artist such as MF DOOM, who meant so much to so many of us for so many years for so many different reasons as truly unique as DOOM himself. So, what better way to pay tribute to The Man, The Myth, THE MASK himself than by speaking to those closest to him? With a heavy heart, I proudly present Shadows of Tomorrow; a new recurring column in tribute to DOOM in an effort to re-tell the tall tales, strange stories, and lesser-known tidbits of The Metal Face Villain himself. R.I.P. Daniel "MF DOOM" Dumile Thompson. "I remember only a few years removed from college graduation, talking to my (very smart) friend Pate after I lamented not reading enough theory to feel I could enter certain conversations (academically or on The Internet.) His response was to read at my own pace and not worry, that it was important to not get t...

Honestly, it doesn't even feel like there's a proper way to elegize an eccentric and extremely talented artist such as MF DOOM, who meant so much to so many of us for so many years for so many different reasons as truly unique as DOOM himself. So, what better way to pay tribute to The Man, The Myth, THE MASK himself than by speaking to those closest to him? With a heavy heart, I proudly present Shadows of Tomorrow; a new recurring column in tribute to DOOM in an effort to re-tell the tall tales, strange stories, and lesser-known tidbits of The Metal Face Villain himself. R.I.P. Daniel "MF DOOM" Dumile Thompson. "MF DOOM is easily the most inspirational act in Indie Hip-Hop. His voice, flow, production, character development, story-telling, and his ability to piece a cohesive album together were all extraordinary. Even in the early 90's in his KMD days, he was way ahead of his time. Going from a bright-eyed youth in his high school/KMD days—who wouldn...

Jason "EDID" McKenzie is a Minneapolis -bred/ Brooklyn -based "Outsider Hip-Hop, Indie & Far Left-field" artist, who, by his own admission, "[makes] all the beats and [raps] all the raps." Since about 2004, ECID has established working relationships with like-minded Experimental Hip-Hop artists, such as Awol One , Eyedea, Kristoff Krane , Louise Dorley FKA Louis Logic, and milo ; over the years, ECID has been part of a number of groups including Living Stereo , Jordan Miché & David Mars Accompanied By ECID, Saturday Morning Soundtrack , Sector 7G, and most recently, TOYFRiEND with Louis Dorley . As many of you may well remembers, we, actually, covered TOYFRiEND 's debut 2017 Indie Pop/Hip-Hop EP, foolHearty with custom artwork designed by @unibrowduck . Just about six months after foolHearty , ECID returned with HowToFakeYourOwnDeath (HTFYOD) his first album solo since 2015's 2-pronged release, PHEROMONE HEAVY/Pheromone Coma: PHE...

How's it going, ladies and germs of the music-loving Internet? Today, we here at The Witzard are proud to present to you, a brand new column: Rap Videos Killed The Radio Star. It's a collection of six of our personal favorite music videos released within the past month or so. Also, full disclosure: my wife and I are leaving for our honeymoon to Italy this upcoming Wednesday and I just wanted to do a bit of a wrap-up/send-off of some Hella dope new music, before temporarily signing off for a couple weeks. This inaugural edition of Rap Videos Killed The Radio Star showcases choice selections from Blockhead Feat. billy woods, Open Mike Eagle & Breezly "Breeze" Brewin, BULLIES AKA Denmark Vessey, DRXQUINN & Azarias, ILL BILL & Stu Banga with Goretex, Knowledge The Pirate, Reckonize Real & Guilty Simpson, and Zilla Rocca. I would also, like to send a very special shout-out to the directors of these very music videos: Mr. Oz (@claytoi,) Lil Kydd, Shawn John...

"Surreal, absurd, abstract, shot through with a E.E. Cummings sense of the vibrant and a Le Guin style comic abstruseness." - The Wire "If it was already written, well, then, shall I not have scorn / A Jazz musician died and Pan Am was born," Leron Thomas / Pan Amsterdam "One of the best horn players around today. [He] realizes the imperative to be more than just a horn player," Iggy Pop. "Elevator Music Vol. 1 marks the first in a three-part series of EP's, which will be released this year. In this installment, we have collabs with Open Mike Eagle & Iggy Pop! Not one for keeping things predictable or even sensical, Pan Amsterdam plans to drop three very different projects this year, all under the banner of "Elevator Music." There will be more surprises to follow, as this plays out..." - Def Pressé Press Release (@DefPresse) Mobile / 15 Seconds by Pan Amsterdam x Iggy Pop I. How did you first meet The Godfather of Pu...

"A penumbra is the space between the shade and the light of a partial eclipse, the area that is neither blacked-out nor illuminated fully. More broadly, the word is defined as something that surrounds or enshrouds a region or object. Like this twilit fringe between being and non-being, the production of Spencer Stephenson—known for his output under the name Botany—gives shape and circumference to The Skull Eclipses' self-titled debut .​ PENUMBRAS lays bare that album's hybrid scaffolding of ambient Boom-Bap, dubby Jungle, and hauntological sample-collage revealing a multi-faceted beat tapestry unadorned by lead-vocals, standing alone as a full-length listening experience. On ​October 26th,​ Western Vinyl is releasing ​PENUMBRAS by ​The Skull Eclipses​, an album of beats and previously unreleased pieces from the self-titled collaborative debut of producer Spencer Stephenson (​Botany​) and rapper Raj Haldar (​Lushlife​) that featured Laraaji, Open Mike Eagle, and many othe...

Darko Save The Queen by Darko The Super Just since the top of 2018, Darko The Super has released a myriad of releases including Buzzy Linhart Changed My Life , Doc Heller's Or Do I Eat This Sandwich?! Bogus Poetry In The Dizzy Age , and Creative Casualty on U DONT DESERVE THIS BEAUTIFUL ART (UDDTBA) as well as Stories of a Made Up Year produced by Height Keech on Cold Rhymes Records , The Hell Hole Store's "I'll Take What I Can Get" Feat. Open Mike Eagle on Already Dead Tapes , and "Bike Spokes" as part of The Custodian of Records' Qwuickieleaks Challenge and a few more loosely released tracks. Now, a few months removed from it's initial release, Darko has decided to revisit a few tracks from Creative Casualty originally released on Pale Blue Records/UDDTBA back in April on limited edition 10-inch lathe-cut vinyl, as well as digital album; "Don't stop me now, buddy guy. The Summer of Darko continues! Darko Save The Queen 7-in...

"This music makes me wanna make more children. It makes me feel like things are gonna be alright," Atmosphere emcee Slug once proclaimed concerning Minneapolis-based duo Bones & Beeker. Consisting of Anthony "Tony" Newes (vocals, guitar, keys, and other sounds) and Brendan Kelly AKA BK-One (production, drum programming, keys, glockenspiel, kalimba) Bones & Beeker released a self-titled 2015 album on Wax Poetics Records . While it's hard to peg Bones & Beeker's output as one distinct genre label, they draw influence from Jazz, Funk/Soul, Indie Pop, Hip-Hop, and a multitude of genre-eschewing sounds; however, the most fitting descriptions of Bones & Beeker's overall sound I've found comes directly from the band themselves—Tony describing it as "The Toys meet Hip-Hop" and BK-One likening their sound to "a sample-based Paul Simon"—during a 2015 video interview with THEOREMATIC . Bones & Beeker also features inst...