Souciant.com has an excellent post that introduces Italy's hiphop scene. One member of that is Karkadan. He is Tunisian and based in Milan. This is what Souciant has to say about "Ganja," a track Karkadan dropped last month.

Rhyming largely in Arabic over a classic reggae loop, the track’s gruff, druggy cosmopolitanism is the stuff legends are made of. Yellowman would be proud.

This is a tune. It's called "Dreams" and it features the pipes of Sean Symphony...

Jesse Lortz upcoming solo debut as Case Studies, The World Is Just a Shape to Fill the Night, drops August 16 on Sacred Bones. Individual tracks have been appearing on the internet since last last year, which isn't surprising. The record is a collection of new material, demos, and unused material from previous projects. In an interview we did with Lortz way back in September of 2010, he had this to say about Case Studies, "we had just put out a D/D record, so if I wanted to do anything with it, it had to be a solo thing. Now it has turned into a crazy project that is integrating lots of parts of my life and skills that I wasn't really exercising Turning into an art project." Read the whole thing here.

Check out new tracks "Lies" and "My Silver Hand" via Stereogum and MTV Hive. And if you haven't seen the video for “Daggers,” then check that out, too.

Here's another track from Gold Leaves, aka Grant Olsen of Arthur & Yu.

Enjoy!

Gold Leaves play the Crocodile Sept. 1.

London has Burial. Barcelona has Downliners Sekt. Burial has practically stopped making dub; Downliners Sekt has not. Their website is packed with new dubs—dubs for what DJ Krush once called "big city lovers." With this zukunftsmusik, the city (lights) becomes a galaxy (stars).
Begin this journey into deep space with the EP Make Hits, Not The Public.

Alter Echo and ERS-ONE (DJ Magneto), two talented Portlanders, have a mix, Matters of Dub Mix, that needs to be beating in your music machine. The space of this dub covers the deep past and the hyper-present, the now of dubstep....
What I wrote about Alter Echo nearly a decade ago can be repeated here:

Alter Echo's dub is for world-weary androids of the next century. It is a frightening dub in the galactic sense, and yet possesses in the depths of its electronic furies a calm and beauty that can only be described as the gleam you might see along the rusting shell of a space station rotating through the blue aura of earth's thinning stratosphere.

Cluster Mag has posted two mixes by Lamin Fofana, an African-born selector/producer who lives way up in Harlem. The first mix, "Romantic Sores," is the cookie. This space...
is a deep and dark dub. Check out Holy Other's "Touch" in the mix. We end in a nebula of longing. Fofana is that brother from another planet.

Those jonesing for new Original Space Neighbors material can now sate themselves with Es Treq, 27-plus minutes of new music from MC Mic Mulligan and producer S. Future. The tracks here stealthily creep in a blazed twilight zone, somewhere between the sci-fi-cartoon scenarios of MF Doom and introverted, sampladelic weirdness of Madlib/Quasimoto. Bonus points for the use of the word "feculence."

Es Treq by GLS2011

Wehrwolve, the former Seattle-based psychedelic project led by Anders Covert, bows out with "Vanishing Luna, Vanishing Sol," which is redolent of the quicksilver percussion and distant, morose melodies of '00s Autechre, with somber grand piano accompaniment dolefully tolling in the background. The track was written and recorded last summer. In September 2010, Covert told me, "I'm going to disappear... Leave the state and go to college. I'll be back with new music in a few years, nobody will know it's me. Thank you for your support and goodbye." Let's hope that wherever Covert is, inspiration continues to flow through him.

Vanishing Luna, Vanishing Sol by wehrwolve

Bellingham producer Crazy Old Bat has a sonic response to the Rapture that—shockingly—didn't come to pass May 21. It's a massive, vituperative dirge that, if there were any justice in this world, would swallow up Harold Camping, chew him up, and then vomit him into the deepest circle of Hell (assuming Hell exists; further studies need to be conducted to confirm it). In the meantime, revel in the malevolent tarpit vortex of "Rapture (o o o p s)."

Rapture (o o p s) by crazy old bat

The producer, Zavala, of my favorite local hiphop album of 2010, Dark Time Sunshine's Vessel, recently released Vessel Instrumentals.

Do not listen to this song this morning or you will fall asleep forever. Maybe wait until later in the day when you're all stressed out.

Sleep ∞ Over, "Bathsalts" MP3 by The FADER

Hear this live Saturday, May 21, The Vera Project, 7:30 pm, $9.

Stereogum has posted up a new track from the upcoming Hella album and OH MY GOD DOES IT SHRED SO HARD. With the act pared back down to the meat-and-potatoes lineup of Zach Hill and Spencer Seim, "Untitled" instantly transports me to the good old days of Hold Your Horse Is /Devil Isn't Red era Hella - where fingertaps and 64th note drum rolls reigned supreme and song structures were anything but linear or predictable. Definitely looking forward to the new album by these guys, due out July/August-ish on Sargent House.

Hella - "Untitled"

Huh?! Sounds like a fucked-up dream scenario, but action-flick star Vin Diesel (then known as Mark Sinclair) actually recorded with genius producer/composer Arthur Russell, a collab leveraged 25 years ago through the efforts of one-time Captain Beefheart guitarist Gary Lucas. Weird weird weird! And not very good... Diesel sounds tentative and stilted and Russell appears to be sabotaging him by trickily morphing the drums. Hahaha. If there's a bigger WTF? lurking in the vaults than this, please let us know.

Listen to the inchoate hiphoppery and read about the back story here.