 |
Category: Music
Digital Identities,
Okay, I'm not going to dwell on this pitch but I do want to say it once clearly: I'm using Facebook for a lot of my communications lately, so if any of you are on Facebook, add me as a friend! And if you're not on it yet, good luck trying to resist. Maybe we can watch a video together on your LaserDisc Player... Now let's put that awkwardness behind us and get to something substantial.
I'm writing now to announce my latest creative brainchild: Mud Sun. Mud Sun is a group collaboration between myself and Dizraeli, who is currently the UK National BBC Slam Champion and a truly amazing poet and lyricist, as well as the front man for the hip-hop/dub band Bad Science. I met him at a spoken word event back in 2005 and we've been writing and recording hip-hop tracks together ever since. Last summer when I was touring the UK we took this collaboration to the next level and decided to join forces and start a group, which is how Mud Sun was born.
Our first release is a five track EP entitled "Mine the Gap", mostly produced by the mighty Infinite Potential crew from London, which is now finished and ready for release (available through mail order and digital download). You might like to listen as you read on, rather than keeping yourself in suspense, so you can preview the music by clicking Here.
The title track finds us both riding the London Tube and taking in the sights, sounds, and smells of that definitive experience of Britannia, and the other four songs take the idea of culture clashes and the modern societal circus in different directions. This is the first rap collaboration I know of that spans the Atlantic (no, Gnarles Barkley is not rap). Mud Sun is dirty, joyful, festive, rebellious hip-hop at its best, and I invite you to revel in it. The album favorite so far is "Fried Rice", produced by Brighton's Tom Caruana, which features Aaron Nazrul on a truly bizarre and anthemic chorus that's catchier than MSG.
So for me this is going to be the summer of basking in the sun and rolling in the mud. Dizraeli and I are taking Mud Sun on a festival tour of the UK starting in June, and we will be co-writing and performing a two-man show for the Edinburgh Festival in August. Dizraeli shares my passion for breaking down the genre barriers of hip-hop, and he brings all kinds of theatrical talents to the stage from his background as a spoken word dynamo. We have a genuinely amazing story in mind for this new hip-hop theatre project (a de facto sequel to the Rap Canterbury Tales), but the details will have to emerge in good time.
For now, I'd like to enlist your help in getting this tour rolling. I have an agent based in Glastonbury who will be helping me to program gigs, both for Mud Sun and for my solo Rap Canterbury Tales performances, so if any of you have connections or suggestions for us, people who can help us to spread the word, plan events, and get publicity and radio play for the album, please don't hesitate to get in touch. I am proud to say that this is the best hip-hop project I have been involved in yet, and I think it deserves to be heard by many. But I am biased. You can download press and booking information by clicking Here.
As a final bonus, the original artwork for the album was done by Bryan Talbot, the British underground comic legend, famous for his graphic novels "Heart of Empire", "One Bad Rat" and "Alice in Sunderland". I met Bryan at the Brisbane Writer's Festival back in September and as a favour he offered to illustrate an album cover for me, and I asked him to take on the Mud Sun project. I think the artwork is brilliant, capturing so many key things about Dizraeli and I and our dynamic, although a lot of people have been saying it doesn't look like me. Maybe it just looks like the way I picture myself...
Well, I'll let you judge for yourself on the Mud Sun Myspace page. Here's a link to Bryan's website if you want to see more.
Looking forward to hearing back from some of you (it's been too long, I know).
Baba
5:29 AM
Powered by  | | English | | Albanian | | Arabic | | Bulgarian | | Catalan | | Chinese | | Croatian | | Czech | | Danish | | Dutch | | Estonian | | Filipino | | Finnish | | French | | Galician | | German | | Greek | | Hebrew | | Hindi | | Hungarian | | Indonesian | | Italian | | Japanese | | Korean | | Latvian | | Lithuanian | | Maltese | | Norwegian | | Polish | | Portuguese | | Romanian | | Russian | | Serbian | | Slovak | | Slovenian | | Spanish | | Swedish | | Thai | | Turkish | | Ukrainian | | Vietnamese |
|