I: Contentinental Breakfast
This week: Everybody Loves Kanye
Welcome to Contentinental Breakfast, a weekly rundown of what I’ve been consuming this past week.
🎶 MUSIC 🎶 El Guincho’s “Michael Dior Mixtape”
I mentioned my all-time favourite music video a few weeks ago — El Guincho’s Bombay. This week I’m giving a shout out to a new mixtape from the Spanish musician.
El Guincho makes sample-infused tropicalia, and this mixtape is a great introduction to his work. Particularly Jetski Abandonado, a fruity romp that sounds like Salvador Dali’s dreams.
As the headline below indicates, El G has referenced Kanye’s TLOP album cover — the most ubiquitous sleeve image to never have even adorned a physical record, btw. Great PR move on that one — it earned him a write up on Pitchfork.
The most trusted voice in music.pitchfork.com
🎶 MUSIC 🎶 Soundcloud Go
As you may have noticed, I didn’t post a song link for the Michael Dior Mixtape. This was no mistake, rather a consequence of the week’s big music news: the launch of Soundcloud Go.
In short, Soundcloud Go is a paid subscription service not dissimilar from Spotify, Tidal or Apple Music. Whilst Soundcloud have been trying to sell the notion of more tracks from established artists, ad-free offline music etc. this is very clearly a door closing rather than a door opening.
As Pilerats astutely notes, in their eulogy to Soundcloud, the service was always about discovering new music, rather than hording and categorizing your existing tracks. Go and the consequential changes in functionality for Soundcloud (tracks blocked for free users, tracks limited to 30 second previews) has completely altered this. For one example, some tracks from What So Not’s Gemini EP have been blocked for free users, despite being released for free and uploaded by the record label themselves. This block is in place for users worldwide, even though Go is not even available in some countries (for example Australia) yet.
RIP Soundcloud.
The progression in music listening over the past few decades is incredibly interesting and the fact that it constantly…pilerats.com
🎶 MUSIC 🎶 Lido “Life of Peder”
Continuing with the musical theme, producer and prodigious mega-star-in-waiting Lido dropped an 8-minute reassembling of The Life of Pablo.
The content continues to flow out of Mr. West’s latest album — say what you want about his music, his personality, his Twitter posts, there is no musician in the world more influential right now.
Back to Lido: more than the actual music, I love the audacity to remix not just one song, but a whole album, and to package it into one continuous flow. There are plenty of melodic highlights too though. By layering I Love Kanye onto a sample from Highlights the previously acapella track becomes a million times more listenable. Lido then makes a beat out of Kanye’s giggle (also from I Love Kanye). Now that be so Kanye.
Lido could make gold from anything.
🎶 MUSIC 🎶 The Paul Institute
It’s been an exciting music week, even if you don’t get your kicks from Kanye West homages. Check out this killer new track from A. K. Paul:
With it came the announcement of The Paul Institute — a joint project from brothers A. K. and Jai Paul. There as been huge hype and speculation around Jai Paul as far back as 2010, despite only releasing two songs to the public’s ears, BTSTU and Jasmine. An album appeared online in 2013 purporting to be Jai’s, but it was quickly removed and disowned by Jai and his record label, XL Recordings. The whispers that a Jai Paul album could now be on its way are growing, however for now the Paul Institute is little more than a webstore/marketing tool. Definitely a “watch this space”.
The Paul Institute's first single is out tomorrow. Brothers Jai and A.K. Paul announced a mysterious new entity called…www.factmag.com
🎶 MUSIC 🎶 http://vipoty.com/
GFOTY is one of the more out-there characters amongst the PC Music cast.
VIPOTY is a website. Beyond that it’s a little hard to define… It features the video above, as well as new music from GFOTY. The track “Amazing”, linked below, is probably her most melodic PC Music output, but it’s still more a statement than a song.
Apart from that the website features various ‘…of the Year’ categories/awards. Ranging from Prankster of the Year to Baby of the Year to Barrister of the Year. My favourite quote comes from Wedding of the Year:
When one thinks of Weddings, they usually SHRIEK “BORING! PASS ME A BLOWJOB!”
That’s a pretty good indication of the rest of the website, so if that didn’t make you snigger I’d probably just move along swiftly…
🎶 MUSIC/ART 🎨 Contact: Augmented Acoustics
Moving from one cross-medium spectacle to another, we have here Contact: Augmented Acoustics. It couldn’t be further from VIPOTY in terms of high-browedness…
As is explained in the video, Felix Faire’s work is all about exploring the interactions between sound, sight and touch. Creating music and images that are a literal representation of physical movements.
Architecture and music are essentially the same thing; you just experience them with different senses.
I was shown this video by a friend of mine who saw him perform at Piano Day, a tribute to all things piano, curated by Nils Frahm. More about that here.
📸 YOUTUBE 📸 Studio C
Studio C is an internet comedy channel. I only came across them this week thanks to the video below that I guess went somewhat viral.
To be honest, I’m not a huge fan of a lot of the comedy. It has a very SNL feel, with a lot of cheesy caricature, but the clip below hits the nail on the head (or the face…).
🙌🙌🙌 MEDIUM ARTICLE OF THE WEEK 🙌🙌🙌 Instagram and the Cult of the Attention Web: How the Free Internet is Eating Itself by Jesse Weaver
I’m not afraid to say that this is the best article I’ve ever read on Medium.
In it, Jesse Weaver dissects the problems of a free internet, with companies vying for our time rather than our money, and the consequences of this. I won’t add any other comment, you should just read it.
Instagram’s most recent announcement that they are changing their feed is a symptom of a larger problem that is eating…medium.com
Contentinental Breakfast returns every Monday Morning, serving up your weekly dose of content. No rules, anything goes.
