THE COUP – MVRemix Urban

Can music – alone – change the world? This is a question best suited for an artist like Raymond “Boots” Riley. And his answer would most likely be no… Surely, if any political hip-hop group could have incited global change by now, it would have been The Coup. Not for lack of trying, October 30^th, 2012 saw the dawn of their newest release, “Sorry To Bother You,” and in keeping with their past work, the album channels and exudes a revved up and revolutionary sound — put alongside a funky, fun and spirited party beat! As ever, they tackle a difficult and controversial subject matter. It’ll be a challenge for most anyone to fight the urge to bop their heads, however, in favor of picking up and starting a revolution. Taking on corporate America and the greedy 1% armed with kazoos and wash-boards is certainly creative, but effective? I guess we’ll see.

Boots’ wit, timing and the fusion of punk inspired rhythms with just a hint of the more funkedelic side of Motown in the 60’s are some of the high-points of “Sorry To Bother You.” What really stood out is a peculiar sort of fusion, sounding something like cheer-happy pop songstress, Gwen Stefani meets former experimental rock group, Ween – an unlikely, intriguing and eclectic mix you won’t want to skip over in “My Murder, My Love”.

Where the album disappoints is a lack of consistency. You may be left hungry for the same adrenaline pumping ingenuity that begins after the first “Magic Clap” of track 1. The momentum of the music slowly fizzles out between gems like “Strange Arithmetic”, an urban take on the same philosophy behind Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick In The Wall,” and “Guillotine”, an anthem for the other 99%. “Sorry To Bother You” makes you think, makes you move, and makes you want to party, hard. For those reasons it is successful.

DJ SPOOKY THAT SUBLIMINAL KID RELEASES NEW ALBUM TITLED “THE SECRET SONG” NEW ALBUM IN STORES AND ONLINE VIA THIRSTY EAR RECORDINGS ON OCTOBER 6 SPECIAL GUESTS INCLUDE THURSTON MOORE OF SONIC YOUTH, THE JUNGLE BROTHERS, THE COUP, ROB SWIFT (THE X-ECUTIONERS), SPOKEN WORD EMCEE MIKE LADD, AND MANY OTHERS

Thirsty Ear Recordings is excited to announce the release of DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid’s latest manifesto titled “The Secret Song.” Set for an Oct. 6 release, the new record marks DJ Spooky’s sixth full-length album and will feature guest appearances from notable artists and musicians such as Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, The Jungle Brothers, The Coup, Rob Swift, Mike Ladd and many others. “The Secret Song” is a groundbreaking meditation on hip-hop and electronic music’s relationship to philosophy, economics, and the science of sound in a world where the steady drumbeat of the financial meltdown has made music the last refuge of young people with less and less time and money.

It’s been a while since DJ Spooky has released a new album of his own material, but this constantly and famously creative force, also known as Paul D. Miller, has been anything but idle. Over the last couple of years, Miller has shot films in Antarctica, remixed a controversial piece of cinema history, and produced two of MIT Press’ top-selling recent books.

In his role as DJ Spooky, the recording artist and producer, Miller has worked with or remixed everyone from Metallica to Yoko Ono; from the Kronos Quartet to Killah Priest. Even the master of collage rock, Beck, remixed DJ Spooky for his first series of mixes online. Miller’s most recent work was a series of compilations and remixes of Jamaican dub and reggae. Now, after endless touring and a vast array of projects in just about every conceivable media, Miller found time to lock himself in his studio and lay down the tracks for this new project, “The Secret Song.”

With material taken from collaborations with people as diverse as Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, to Vijay Iyer, old school African hip-hop legends Zimbabwe Legit, stunning turntablist Rob Swift (the legendary leader of The X-ecutioners), to political hip-hop from The Coup, The Jungle Brothers, Mike Ladd, and Abdul Smooth from India, DJ Spooky connects the dots between jazz, classical music, and the struggle to create new, dynamic relationships between old school hip-hop and the 21st century’s rapidly changing info-culture landscape. Showcasing Spooky’s eclecticism and ever-present desire to spotlight a great amount of musical genres and causes from all around the world, the album’s lead single “Azadi” (which means “Freedom” in Farsi and is sung by Iran’s Sussan Deyhim) was released in conjunction with “A Day of Solidarity With the People of Iran” as a free download with Artists 4 Freedom.

On “The Secret Song,” DJ Spooky looks to bands like Nine Inch Nails, and Radiohead for inspiration, as he flips old school and new school sounds into a sonic fiction landscape where rock meets dub and experimental jazz; where he can re-construct a classic song of a band that is one of the most sampled bands in hip-hop, like Led Zeppelin, make dub out of it and add strings by the Golden Hornet Project. “The Secret Song” is an album that puts DJ Spooky’s brand of conceptual hip-hop front-and-center with eerily accessible reconstructions only an artist such as himself could possibly formulate.

According to DJ Spooky, his new album ironically refers to a few notable elements. The first being that “The Secret Song” is made by failed ATM transactions, credit card fraud, jazz motifs made into stock exchanges, and the futures market. Secondly, it is an album that says 2012 isn’t the end of time, like the Mayan Calendar says – it’s just the end of the last Walmart. Additionally, the album exposes the economics of music as the music industry as we know it goes through massive transformation – it’s the new Stop and Shop of the Mind. And lastly, “The Secret Song” has tracks hidden in barcode throughout most of downtown Manhattan. Don’t believe him? Swipe your IPhone anywhere you see a barcode. And so with “The Secret Song,” we look back at the 20th century and see a couple of massive changes that put it in, what DJ Spooky calls, “history through lens of the sample.”

Following in the steps of The Cinematic Orchestra’s rescore of Dziga Vertov’s cinema classic “Man with A Camera,” “The Secret Song” album will be accompanied by a DVD of a rare film from the Russian Revolution, the 1924 film “Kino-Glaz” (Cinema Eye) by the renowned Russian Director Dziga Vertov. DJ Spooky rescored the film and remastered the footage in New York for the DVD to serve as a companion-piece to his new album.

In addition to the making of “The Secret Song,” DJ Spooky continues to bring his artistic output to fans across the world and dip his toes into other creative realms. He performed his previous piece, “DJ Spooky’s Rebirth of a Nation,” more than sixty times around the world, from Lincoln Center in NYC to the Acropolis in Athens. At the end of 2008, the DVD version was released by Starz Media – the folks who brought us “The Simpsons” and “King of the Hill.” He’s played festivals from the main stage at Bonnaroo to Michael Franti’s Power To the Peaceful to the 2009 Bumbershoot Festival. Earlier this year, Miller performed before a crowd of 100,000 on the mall in Washington, DC for Earth Day, along with the Flaming Lips and others. In the world of books, Miller’s “Sound Unbound” features essays from legendary figures like Steve Reich, Pierre Boulez, Chuck D, Daphne Keller (the Senior Legal Counsel to Google), Saul Williams, Brian Eno, Moby, and many others. In his reconstructing of the role of the DJ, Miller’s visual artwork has been honored with solo shows at highly established art venues like The Tate Modern, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Robert Miller Gallery.