Deep Green

Holding On - Detroit Emeralds - 1971
You're Gettin' a Little Too Smart - Detroit Emeralds - 1973

Resisting the urge to follow Brand Nubian with some more beloved old school hip hop, I find myself motivated to share something I haven't listened to in a long time. Enter the Detroit Emeralds. Calling them obscure would be mean (and untrue), but calling them well-known would also be a stretch. The name "Detroit Emeralds" connotes a very particular shade of green to me: somewhere between the trim on the Million Dollar Man's lapels and the dark, distorted swirl you see through the bottom of a beer bottle. It's really much nicer than it sounds. Symptomatic of my failure to escape old school hip hop, they've also been sampled by the usual suspects (De La Soul, Nas, Main Source, etc.)

Hey! Student

Alegria da Vida - Marcos Valle - 1974
Music is Math - Boards of Canada - 2002

"Alegria da Vida" comes from a Brazilian kids' show called Vila Sésamo. Basically, it's the Brazilian version of Sesame Street, but with trippy psychedellic costumes.

Is it just me or does this get you feeling nostalgic for warped VHS tapes? I'm thinking of those old educational videos they used to show in elementary school (always the last week of class before summer vacation).

Just a '98 kinda week for me...

Probable Cause - Brand Nubian - 1998

When I rolled a L, I never expected to go to jail...

And a little how-to video for all you curious youngsters...

No Lesson.

Pakard - plastikman: artifakts - 1998
Consumed - plastikman: consumed - 1998


I have a dim memory of putting on some house music at my parents' place about 5 years ago, and my father breaking out into some bizarre dance and saying "Look, I'm on LSD..."

Point taken. I have a constant attraction to Richie Hawtin's hair, and his minimal work. It's technical, meticulous, clean, haunting. It makes me want to live out the rest of my life as a D/A converter so I can watch those 1's and 0's emerge into waveforms. If I made a movie about taking acid and ducking into an alley in Akihabara to play obscure RPGs after a nuclear war, this shit would be an integral part of the soundtrack.

Maybe I've just been listening to the whole Bay freak out over Daft Punk for the past 2 weeks (kind of glad that's over). But I thought I'd drop a few tracks in the spirit of headphones.