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@Puddah: So hängen geblieben bin ich auf Westcoast Gangsta Sachen ja auch wohl nicht, und ausserdem darf mann sich als menschliches Wesen doch mal weiterbilden

...sollte von meiner Seite keinen negativen Beigeschmack haben.
Hoffe mal das ist nicht so bei dir angekommen.
West-Coast-Gangsta-Veteran ist doch eigentlich ne Auszeichnung

Find ich gut, das dir der Sound auch gefällt.

sole leaves anticon records

Today, with a heavy heart I end 11+ years of working with anticon. In the early days of the label, anticon was a pet project of mine, a life-long dream. We fulfilled the dream of a collectively run record label and put out many great records and stood as an image of defiance against the music industry. Those memories, I will always have and be proud of. Sadly, those times are gone, and I need to live in the present as I prepare for the future.

Leaving the company was not an easy decision, but it was made necessary by a number of factors. Upon returning to the states from a 2-year exile in Spain, I found myself increasingly at odds with the business end of anticon and began doing more DIY work via soleone.org. Running my own website and taking a more hands on approach with my art has always brought me great satisfaction and it is what I am choosing to return to. There are no ill feelings between myself and members of anticon. I will continue to work with many of the artists and will always love them as brothers and consider them allies. This is a decision to change the way my music will be exploited and adapt to shifting paradigms.

We created anticon as a response to what was going on at the time in the music industry - the indy boom of the late 90’s. There were still a viable music industry then and people bought records. That’s how we built up our empire. The music industry isn’t just dying, but what it means to be a recording artist is changing. Technology is making everything cheap, and cheapening everything it touches. Soon the old ways of selling records will be a distant memory, along with magazines, working musicians and employed blue-collar dads. It’s not a time to cry about the recession, or urge people to go to their local mom and pops and pick up the new sole & skyrider LP. Technology is working its magic, and instead of being a passenger on its ship, I have decided to plot a new course for myself.

The very fact that I have thrived in this environment still sometimes is a surprise to me. I’m 32 today. I put out my first vinyl when I was 16. For me its always been about ethics & passion, doing what felt right in my core and acting on that, whether or not it was the popular or conventionally wise thing to do.

From now on now all my releases will be made available @ soleone.org via my new label Black Canyon Records and exclusively distributed worldwide via Revolver USA. There is an email newsletter list ton soleone.org, if you wish to be kept in the loop on my releases/updates that will be the best place.

Peace
Tim “sole” Holland

new contact info:
tim @ soleone dot org (press, booking, inquries etc.)
twitter.com/mcsole
facebook.com/timhollandsole
myspace.com/timholland
www.soleone.org

The debut album from WHY? multi-instrumentalist Josiah Wolf offers up a rare achievement--a solo work with true legs of its own. Wolf's visual snapshots illustrate the wistfulness of a mundane moment and offer canny excavations of those poignancies that lie beneath the surface: tough triumphs, tougher truths, and outright failures. His lean poems are set to an autumnal mix of warm folk and easy psychedelia played out (by Wolf alone) on guitar, vibes, kalimba, Hammond organ, bells, bass, and drums, to name a few. The end result, a sort of chamber pop minus the showy sweeps--virtuosity without the virtuoso--makes Jet Lag as impressive in its subtle execution as it is a timeless, heartfelt listen.

"The Trailer and the Truck" opens the album like a lost thought on its way out of sleep. Notes freed by mallets bounce into the fuzzy foreground, bent chords stretch out from metal strings, then bundled bursts of drum-and-strum clear the way for Wolf's voice. On "Master Cleanse (California)," he mulls over region and religion atop spare acoustics and a kaleidoscopic chorus where shimmering sounds move to an elastic tempo. One of the album's best follows, "The Opposite of Breathing," with a shuffling beat, cool tones, and rich textures that evoke late-'60s Greenwich Village.

Throughout these songs, style and substance are treated with equal aplomb. The rolling bass and bright vocals of "The New Car" split the difference between The Zombies and Daniel Johnston. "The Apart Meant" rolls out a cloudy darkness; after such heaviness, the quiet Paul Simon folk of "That Kind of Man" feels like fresh air, while "Ohioho" is genuinely sunny.

Jet Lag came together following the dissolution of an eleven-year relationship, and during a move from California back to the Midwest, where Wolf grew up. But its final two songs only look back long enough to prepare their author for newness. The stormy "Gravity Defied" conveys that knowing resignation that eventually comes, while on album-ender "The One Sign," the breeze that Wolf was waiting on becomes a gale threatening to crash a loaded airplane. Rather than cower together or pray to God, however, the passengers stand to face fate head on. Wolf's final lyric--"'Heaven help me' are just words that time will make you say"--echoes out before the shelter offered by the song dissolves into the outdoors.

Video from Baths’ debut album Cerulean, out now on anticon. Directed by Alex Takacs and Joe Nankin.

Wie auf den meisten Songs fällt es Dougie auch hier schwer seine Aussagen in stilvolle Worte zu kleiden, auffällig inflationär tauchen die Worte "Niggaz" und "Bitches" auf. Wer damit Schwierigkeiten hat, der wird wahrscheinlich überhaupt keinen Zugang zu diesem Longplayer finden.

Featuring remixes by Dalek, Buck65, Alias, 13 & God, Lazer Sword, Our Brother the Native, Odd Nosdam, Baths, Bracken and a brand new Themselves song. Limited to 1500 numbered copies.

Six years after the beautifully brittle eponymous debut, the cross-continental musical brotherhood of 13 & God returns with Own Your Ghost. This second album marks a vital shift, from collaborative project to bona fide band, as Oakland art-rap stalwarts Themselves (Adam “Doseone” Drucker and Jeffrey “Jel” Logan, plus Subtle’s Dax Pierson and Jordan Dalrymple) and German pop experimentalists The Notwist (Markus and Micha Acher, Martin Gretschmann) truly become one. Own Your Ghost is a warm set of life-affirming songs on the subject of death, drawing equal parts from raw spontaneity, lush melody and boundless imagination.

No song embodies this better than “Armored Scarves.” This swirl of acoustic strums, piano plinks, drum hits and electronic bits lifts Markus Acher’s icy coo and, in turn, Drucker’s own rarely heard singing voice, building to a full-band chant that echoes the theme: Protect your neck against the scythe of time. Also approaching 13 & God perfection is “Death Minor,” the moody splendor and orchestral swing of which bring to mind a mix of Broadcast and David Axelrod. It’s a gorgeously noirish backdrop for the musings of the two frontmen, who, while recording, would pull their lyrics from a stack of Drucker’s poems, letting each song find its words organically.

Own Your Ghost is a hugely diverse album with two polar opposites at its center. “Old Age” is, at its core, an upbeat, fuzz-caked summer song, while “Et Tu” is a black and menacing slab of glitch-riddled krautrock. Two tracks later, a stuttering Bhangra beat propels “Sure as Debt” as Drucker growls out a rap about old age and unpaid bills. Strings, keys, woodwinds and turntables were all bent to the band’s cause. They banged on shelves and boxes of change, played a broken kora and a hacked Game Boy, and sampled Sylvia Plath, Marilyn Hacker and themselves (via dubplate).

The record was made over three sessions, the first in Oakland—with a feed running from the mixing board to Pierson’s bedroom—and the other two in Weilheim at The Notwist’s studio. Despite being a seven-bodied beast, 13 & God remains single-headed, committed to building a body of work that will outlast us all. By example, they remind us to get our life-after-death on, creatively speaking. In other words, Own Your Ghost.