The Witzard

NOOB SAIBOT 1-4 is an upcoming series of releases from Joshua Rogers at Illuminated Paths/Broken Machine Films Presents... (or BMFP...) which I've, personally, been hearing rumblings about for quite a while now. I believe, I've been hearing about NOOB SAIBOT 1-4 from Mr. Rogers just about as long as VIPER & Broken Machine Films Presents... BOUT THA MONEY , both of which were fairly recently re-mixed/mastered by Dan "Height" Keech at Cold Rhymes Records. Joshua Rogers/BMFP... has a very unique cut-and-paste style of creating Hip-Hop, Vaporwave, and largely genre-eschewing music culled from a nearly 20-year vault of original production work curated/created by Mr. Rogers himself; using "strictly cassette-to-cassette and VHS/record-to-cassette manipulation and layering, utilizing only vintage tape decks and medium," much like BOUT THA MONEY . NOOB SAIBOT 1 was quietly released by Illuminated Paths on Friday, August 30, 2019 with NOOB SAIBOT 2-4 , r...

"It's cool to see things come full-circle. A year ago, nearly to the day, I walked out of my classroom and headed home for Winter Break . My only aim for that window of creative time was to put together the foundation for the best project possible to submit for Fake Four 's Freecember series the following year," San Francisco/Bay Area rapper-producer OneWerd wrote within a recent press statement. Adding that he then, spent the next three weeks "experimenting with new production approaches, brain-storming, and collecting song ideas and working them out into lyrics." Upon completing eight genre-eschewing beats for what would ultimately, become his Alive EP , OneWerd reached out to a particular collection of artists he looked up to and admired to appear within Alive ; this would end up including features from Denver emcee sole , Graves 33, Sleep of Oldominion , Ersatz Splynter, and Fake Four, Inc. 's own "anti-boss himself," Ceschi . OneWerd...

Berlin -based multi-instrumentalist, producer, and Baltimore transplant Walter Gross has been steadily rolling out extremely limited edition, thought-provoking cassette releases all year; starting with Black Box Tapes -issued VESTIGE this past March, then, its SUPER BASIC companion piece two months later, and now, Youth:Kill 's A Hunter's Moon EP unleashed today, on the Harvest Moon . Walter Gross also recently assembled "FBR SummerSchool GuestMix 3" for FilthyBroke Recordings' Summer School 2017 series. Youth:Kill consists of Gross along with Big Dada/Fake Four Inc -affiliated emcee Emmanuel "Kiki" Ceac AKA k-the-i??? A 2008 Dusted Magazine review once fittingly described Youth:Kill as "the Underground Hip-Hop version of Black Dice ." A Hunter's Moon is their sixth overall release and first since a self-released 2012 split EP with sole , titled sole/Youth:Kill split . Not entirely unlike its 2017 predecessors, A Hunter...

"After being out of print for almost two decades, I am finally re-issuing my debut album, Bottle of Humans on double-vinyl. In 1998, I moved to California to start a record label with my friends and dedicate my life to music. I was a stranger in a strange land. I didn’t understand it then, but this was a magical period of human and musical history... it was the early era of The Internet and digital recording. Record stores were still a thing. We sat in rooms and made music together. We recorded onto tape. We wrote rhymes on paper. We broke all the rules. These were the early days of what some might later call "Art Rap," "Alternative Hip-Hop," or "Experimental Hip-Hop." Bottle of Humans was my first solo contribution to it. This album wasn’t meant to be an "album" at all; it was an evolving collection of songs I burned onto a CD-R that I strangely titled "Bottle of Humans." I would burn CD-R's at my corporate job, when my bo...

Vestige by Walter Gross " Walter Gross is truly a one of a kind artist, iconoclast and a master of many mediums. He is mainly known for his experimental audio soundscapes, which inhabit a space between Dustbowl Folk re-appropriations, walls of noise, sludgy Trap , Rap, and Prog-Rock . It's easy to throw a bunch of catchphrases together and make a bio seem compelling, but Walter truly walks these lines with grace and originality. Beyond being a music-maker, he is a film director and visual artist. His videos are obsessive collages and unlike so many who utilizes "found art," he brings these pieces to life and creates stunning and unique pieces with them," Black Box Tapes label head and Socially Conscious rapper-producer Tim "sole" Holland wrote within a recent BIO on Walter Gross' Bandcamp . Gross is a Baltimore transplant now living in Berlin , who has been making his own unique slightly Hip-Hop -leaning music and frantic video collages si...

Denver-bred genre-defying Echo Beds are the inagural signees to politically-charged emcee and former Anticon founder Tim "sole" Holland's latest label venture, Black Box Tapes. I would likely describe Echo Beds' rather long-winded "overdriventapehissnoisewalllandscapemetaldrumpummelpain- facevolumetherapy" sound of something strangely evocative of what an imagined missing link between late 80's-1990's Industrial Rock forefathers Nine Inch Nails and their critically-acclaimed modern day counterparts, Noise/Aggro-Rap group Death Grips; an obtuse indefinable sound, better yet, self-described by vocalist/bass player Keith Curts and beat-maker Tom Nelson as "a caterwaul of contact-mic'd oil drums, broken cymbals, battered basses, unrecognizable tape loops, and dilapidated voices with the expressed intention of volume as therapy and put it through the grinder of self-practiced D.I.Y. ethos;" with all that said, I'm proud to finally be a...

NEW ICONS OF A VILE FAITH by Echo Beds Denver -bred genre-defying Echo Beds are the latest signees to politically-charged emcee and former Anticon founder Tim "sole" Holland 's latest label venture, Black Box Tapes . I would likely describe Echo Beds' rather long-winded "overdriventapehissnoisewall- landscapemetaldrumpummelpainfacevolumetherapy" sound of something strangely evocative of what an imagined missing link between late 80's-1990's Industrial Rock forefathers Nine Inch Nails and their critically-acclaimed modern day counterparts, Noise/Aggro-Rap group Death Grips ; an obtuse indefinable sound, better yet, self-described by vocalist/bass player Keith Curts and beat-maker Tom Nelson as "a caterwaul of contact-mic'd oil drums, broken cymbals, battered basses, unrecognizable tape loops, and dilapidated voices with the expressed intention of volume as therapy and put it through the grinder of self-practiced D.I.Y. ethos." ...

"Just dropped the first video from #DEATHDRIVE, "Old Gods Ain't Dead," read a brief less than 140 character @mcsole Tweet; "Old Gods Ain't Dead," which was produced by DJ Pain 1 , premiered over at French online music magazine New Noise's site early Tuesday morning. I first made contact with Tim Holland aka Sole around 2010-11 during the crowd-sourced album roll-out campaign for his stellar politically-charged "rap as journalism" freestyle series, Nuclear Winter, Vol. 2 (Death Panel) . Soon thereafter, he released an album and companion EP with The Skyrider Band , two full-length solo albums across 2012-13, an instrumental Hip-Hop project, and a couple odds-and-ends compilations. " DEATHDRIVE combines modern Pop/Rap aesthetics with the political edge reminiscent of Hip-Hop classics such as Fear of a Black Planet . Sole & DJ Pain 1 utilize the Golden Era Hip-Hop approach of a rapper and DJ without employing gimmicks...