BLOCKHEAD, LUSINE, YPPAH & VOX MOD AT NECTAR LOUNGE
Friday, April 4 2014
Friday, April 4th
Decibel, The Stranger & SolidSound proudly present..
BLOCKHEAD
Ninja Tune
LUSINE
Ghostly International
YPPAH
Ninja Tune
Advance tickets $18 (Early Bird tickets only $15).
Doors at 8pm / 21+
Nectar Lounge
412 N 36th St, Seattle
ABOUT BLOCKHEAD
Tony Simon AKA Blockhead was born and raised in Downtown Manhattan, in New York City. The son of an artist, he found a fondness for music at a young age. In particular, he fell in love with Hip Hop. In his early teens he began penning rhymes and eventually was part of a group called The Overground with a bunch of his friends. While he loved rapping, he also always had an interest in the musical side of things so he would soon abandon his dreams of being a rapper for being the man who made the beats. This was a wise choice.
Eventually, he and his friend Aesop Rock would meet and begin to make music together and release it on the internet. In 2000, Aesop’s album Float was released on Mush Records and quickly propelled both Aesop and Blockhead into notoriety. After that, Blockhead released a breakbeat album on Mush called Blockhead’s Broke Beats.
After a few years more years of making beats for rappers, Blockhead put out his first solo instrumental record on Ninja Tune records , titled Music by Cavelight. This was the first of four critically acclaimed albums he has since released on the UK based label.
He also was one half of the comedy rap duo Party Fun Action Committee, which was released on Definitive Jux records in 2003.
As well as making solo albums and working with Aesop, blockhead has also worked with artists like Murs, Slug, Mike Ladd, Cage, Open Mike Eagle, Maclethal, SA Smash, Isaiah Toothtaker, Illogic and others.
Blockhead has also been busy touring the last 8 years with groups like Aesop Rock, Dj Cam, Amon Tobin, Bonobo, Kid Koala, Cold Cut, Emancipator, and many others.
Currently, he’s finsishing up a bevy of projects , including a new solo album Interludes After Midnight (His fifth album on Ninja Tune), and looking forward to releasing all that new music to the public in the near future.
ABOUT LUSINE
Jeff McIlwain has been producing his visceral, melodic strain of abstract electronic music as Lusine for over 10 years now. Originally a Texas native, McIlwain met Shad Scott while living in LA and put out his self titled debut on Scott’s imprint, Isophlux. He relocated to Seattle in late 2002 and began steadily releasing his music on Ghostly International. McIlwain has also contributed tracks to various compilations and remix releases on Mute, !K7, Kompakt, Asthmatic Kitty, and Shitkatapult. In 2009, he released the album, “A Certain Distance”, which featured the single, “Two Dots.” His newest, critically acclaimed album, “The Waiting Room”, was just recently released in 2013.
McIlwain has performed throughout the US and abroad, including the Sasquatch, SXSW, Decibel, Mutek, DEMF, and Sonar festivals, and sets at London’s esteemed Fabric nightclub, Tokyo’s Unit, and Berlin’s Berghain and Watergate nightclubs. He has been involved in the scoring of various film and commercial projects: co-scoring (with David Wingo) the 2008 film “Snow Angels” (with Kate Beckinsale and Sam Rockwell), and “The Sitter” (Jonah Hill) and scoring the 2009 film “Linewatch” (with Cuba Gooding Jr. and Omari Hardwick). McIlwain teamed up with David Wingo again this year to score the film “Joe” (Nicolas Cage) . He toured Europe over the summer, and is planning some dates in Japan in November to round out 2013.
ABOUT YPPAH
Landscape and memory have always played a central part in the music of Joe Corrales Jr. aka Yppah (pronounced “yippah”). It’s what gives his tunes their sense of place, their physicality, and their ethereal – almost nostalgic – sweetness. Drawing on a cultural heritage that took in My Bloody Valentine alongside hip hop and heavily influenced by various forms of electronic music, psychedelic soul and rock, his music often mixes guitars shoved through massive reverbs/delays, keyboards/synthesizers, live drums, and other techniques. Alluring, uplifting and imbued with natural, unaffected warmth that cuts through the most biting cold, Yppah’s music gives listeners an experience that is both rooted and revitalizing.
Yppah currently has three albums available on Ninja Tune; You Are Beautiful All The Time (2006), They Know What Ghost Know (2009), and Eighty One (2012).
His third album reflects a change in the landscape around him. Midway through the process of recording the demos for what became Eighty One, Corrales started making regular trips to Galveston, on the Texas Gulf coast, to surf. So energized was he by his experiences, he left his home in Texas and moved to Long Beach, California. Unsurprisingly then, he says that the images he had in his head as he made his new music were of the sea and the beach. “I wanted a lot of the songs to feel like a warm wash,” he explains. The record takes its title from the year Corrales was born and, perhaps the very act of moving away from childhood locales stirred up “memories from random times in my life. Like I was trying to recreate certain feelings I had at different points in my life with melodies, if that makes any sense.” And he goes on to ask, “You know how when you’re a child you feel your life has a certain melodic theme that you can’t really put your finger on and you can almost hear it, but it’s not anything you’ve ever heard before?” Eighty One is his attempt to capture those melodies.
Yppah is now performing material from Eighty One with a live band with rotating members sometimes featuring singer, producer and classically trained violinist, Anomie Belle.
ABOUT VOX MOD
While space may be the final frontier, the cosmos also appear to be the creative studio of electronic producer Scot Porter, a.k.a. Vox Mod. On the debut full-length, SYN-ÆSTHETIC, Vox Mod’s galactic production and otherworldly synths hover over beats launched from sci-fi sequencers transporting listeners on a sonic joyride.