Calling all ninjas and ninjettes from San Diego! Are you a fan of Manila Killa? Do you want to attend a fun pool party? Well here’s your chance to kill two birds with one stone. We’re giving away TWO TICKETS to Manila Killa: Summer Sessions at the beautiful W Hotel in downtown San Diego this Sunday afternoon. TMN is thrilled to announce this giveaway and maintain our continued friendship with the Moving Castle crew.
Manila Killa, who is 1/2 of Hotel Garuda and part of the popular Moving Castle Collective, continues to impress with his ever-changing sound and multi-genre style. Having such diversity in his arsenal, the DC artist guarantees a fun time with quality mixes and slick maneuvers. With local support from Sulvida, Primal and Nicky Valentino, SD is about to get real tropical on Sunday. We’ve prepared a playlist from the talented Manila Killa to get you started for this weekend. We hope to see your lovely faces there, so get your bikinis and board shorts ready as we vibe away to your favorite summer jams!
How to enter the contest
1) “Like” us (The Music Ninja) on facebook here:
2) “Like” the Manila Killa on facebook:
3) Comment below this post with what Manila Killa track you want to hear poolside.
When GRiZblew our minds at Mezzanine a couple months back, he was at one point joined by All Good Recordslabel mate Muzzy Bearron the guitar adding an awesome solo to the already enormous set. Just a couple hours ago, GRiZ dropped an absolute gem of a freebie featuring Muzzy Bearr, who put out a stellar debut album a couple months back.
“Summer ’97,” as its name suggests, has been architected specifically for sunny cookouts, block parties and days at the beach. After introducing a backbone of a groovy piano chord progression, fitting vocal sample and signature All Good future funk percussion, the summer tune showcases Muzzy’s skills on the guitar as he solos over the sublime backdrop. Following that guitar solo, GRiZ steps in on the sax offering a jam of his own making for an awesome back and forth between the two talented artists.
Enjoy above and grab a free download–this one’s an absolute must for your summer playlist.
Future hip-hop is a relatively new genre, engineered with the intent to blend the best components of the music world. Meshing lyrical content and melodic flow of artists with the unparalleled smoothness and texture of future beats is the perfect way to satiate all of the auditory senses in one track.
A couple days ago, Atlanta artist and HW&W collective member Gravez released his version of last year’s popular Soulection track, “One Step Back.” In his latest creation, Gravez has taken the noisy original tune and sparingly injected it with synths, the softly inarticulate crooning of Denmark’s Galimatias, and segments of low-pitched dynamics common in the future genre.
The idiophones and hi-hats dotted through this track add to a uniquely smooth quality that is juxtaposed by the fast rhyming vocals of Goldlink. “One Step Back” is a symbol of how contrasting styles can be combined to create a special tune; it is the divergence of styles creating a peaceful banger.
Gravez is wrapping up a tour with shows in Boston and San Francisco in mid-July. Check out “One Step Back” above and download the track here.
International fame and critical acclaim have attached themselves to everything Ta-Ku has released for an unprecedented amount of time. With a stacked resume containing the production of Songs to Break Up To in late 2013, the foundation of Create & Explore, releases under the moniker HWLS, and collaborative efforts with Street Dreams Magazine, Perth’s finest has been hard at work creating a multimedia empire off of his many talents.
His latest EP – appropriately titled Songs To Make Up To – exceeds all expectations in its depth and composition. The latest single from the 8-track EP is a re-composed version of the Atu produced track, “Long Time No See.” The redone version, dubbed “Down For You”, features the intoxicating vocals of Los Angeles singer Alina Baraz.
Baraz, who recently released her own album with Galimatias, harmonizes in the gentle introduction of “Down For You,” over a sparingly light sequence of piano keys, before beginning a dynamic ballad at the 1:15 mark of the song. The unique sounds of Atu are particularly noticeable, especially in the string progression and key resonance throughout.
Ta-Ku has joined together with Atu before, but the release of this sentimental gem by the trio has TMN hoping they plan on coproducing again in the near future. Listeners can purchase the entire album at the Future Classic shop here.
It’s been a few years since we had the pleasure of featuring former chart-topping (see: 2004’s “Lola’s Theme”) house music veterans The Shapeshifters, so when we caught wind of their latest original single, “The Chase”, it felt like high-time to bring them back to the hallowed grounds of TMN. “The Chase” jumps out of the gate behind a smattering of pounding drums, a hypnotic bassline, and some seductive vocal chops before giving way to a soaring complete vocal from Kisch and a gigantic, bouncy topline that pulls the tune straight into club-house paradise. The London are gearing up for their ninth consecutive year at Pacha Ibiza along with a run at Space Ibiza’s Glitterbox alongside Fatboy Slim and Tensnake, and you can be sure “The Chase” will be worming its way all over the island in the coming months; while also signaling the duo’s place near the top of house music royalty.
“The Chase” sees official release on July 10th exclusively through Traxsource, but until then, listen above from your friends at The Music Ninja.
We’re really excited to be teaming up with the Make It Funky collective for the second installment in a series of California showcases highlighting local talent. This time around, we’ll be at Brick & Mortar Music Hall in San Francisco on Saturday bringing yet another myriad of vibes featuring psychedelic indie-rockers Coyote Trickster with support from the soulful Fire and funktastic Color TV. To get you all familiar with our fantastically quirky headliners, we had a unique interview in which we asked the band members–Terence (bass), Paul (guitar), Eric (guitar and vocals) and Huli (drums)–a few questions and then had them finish ten sentences. Get to know the band through their answers and grab your tickets at the link below.
Eric: There was a big group of meilleur casino en ligne france people at Santa Clara [University] that played music together. Kind of an amorphous group of people playing in a cloudy haze, bumping into each other and hearing things out. And then there was a party that came around and the people who were hosting wanted bands to play. So, the big blob full of people that played music together all kind of formed into different bands for the party and one of the bands was Coyote Trickster. That was our first gig. We played with a different drummer then. We moved up to San Francisco after college and then met Huli up here and started playing with him.
Terence: I think once I started playing with Eric–we lived in the same dorm freshman year– and jamming with these guys, I realized it was something I really want to be a huge part of my life. Long story short we ended up living together in a pretty cool space where we can live and play and create. We’re doing what we can and seeing where it goes.
TMN: Tell us a bit about the recording process behind your debut LP.
Paul: We did all the tracking at our house in San Francisco in our garage. I did guitar parts in my closet. Eric put up a bunch of mattresses for a vocal booth. The most disgusting Craigslist mattresses (laughs). We did all that and mixed at Tiny Telephone here in San Francisco and then we got some guy to master it pretty much because we saw he did something for Jerry Garcia.
TMN: Between the soulful vocals, psychedelic elements and jazzy jams, it’s pretty hard to place your music. How do you think about your sound?
Eric: I think we’ve all grown up in an age where genres are so fluid and changing all the time. We never listened to pure rock or pure soul or pure blues—it was always a mixture of all these things together. So, I think we always just search for a groove in all of the songs. They all have to have some kind of rhythm that hooks us and gets people moving. If you see us on stage we’re always bouncing a bit. That’s the core of anything we’re trying to find that works with the band–that kind of groove or rhythm that we all get locked into and excited by. We’re just looking for something that has that appealing background to it and then we’ll combine all the different pieces to fill around that groove.
FINISH THE SENTENCE…
When I was 13, I couldn’t stop listening to…
Huli: Halfway Between The Gutter And The Stars by Fatboy Slim
Paul: Led Zeppelin.
Terence: The Fugees.
Eric: I have the worst one out of everyone. I was probably rocking Third Eye Blind—the self titled album. That’s a great album.
The first song I ever made…
Huli: …was called “Healthy Gums” and only used FL Studio presets.
Paul: …was in high school, I don’t know what it was called, a country song with very dirty, sexual innuendo in the lyrics.
Eric: I probably stole from someone else and told people I made it. It was probably like a Good Charlotte chord progression that I slowed down.
When artists, or in this case, producers, begin their careers, they have build a reputation for themselves by sticking to and mastering a specific genre. Over time, as the artist’s fan base builds and their name becomes much more prominent, we connect them to that single genre, and we think of them as experts in it. But what happens when the artists, whose music we thought we knew so well, decide to step outside the boundaries of the genre they became so recognizable for? As fans, we respond in a multitude of ways, from anger and disappointment to full on support.
In the case of Lookas’s fresh release, “Apollo,” fans will feel far from let down. Moving away from his popular festival trap style, Lookas steps into the territory of future, and divulges some secret versatility. The title, “Apollo,” both parallels and matches the musical style of the song as it explores his abilities in a different musical sector, and paints an otherworldly picture in our minds. Even from the beginning, the sound seems stranger to us, except we cannot help but feel intrigued. This intrigue continues the full length of the track, simultaneously revealing an incredible product. Grab the free download above, crank up the speakers, and get ready to be transported to another dimension.
