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Rahsheed (now known as Maylay Sparks) dropped one of the most slept on debut albums of 1997 with Wasabi. The album was only released in Japan and came out on a very limited basis so it pretty much stayed under the radar in Europe and the US. Now the CD will be back available on a limited basis with revisited artwork and obi as well!

L'Orange & Solemn Brigham are Marlowe

"An artist afraid to overreach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong.”

Over a half-century later, the axiom remains true for hyper-kinetic hip-hop innovators, North Carolina’s L’Orange and Solemn Brigham—the hard-boiled duo behind the fun house fever dream, Marlowe.

Released on Mello Music Group, Marlowe is a triumph of ambition, a rap bricolage blending prohibition and civil rights-era samples with Asian psychedelic rock flourishes. Solemn Brigham controls the microphone like a general who can’t help but be right. His flow is a blitzkrieg. It’s an Olympian sprint, gliding over snares and kick-drums like hurdles. He’s a showman seeking revolution—resolute in his desire to strike equilibrium between awareness and entertainment.

Solemn applies the fictional protagonist’s search for the truth towards different ends. His crimes are existential yet specific, rooted in the injustices of the past and the attempt to redress them in the present. He’s an artist perennially seeking something to fight for, channeling energy from the music of the civic rights era, stealing timeless rhythms and inflection from classic funk and soul. An old soul with original ideas, tapping into the eternal reservoir of Sam Cooke to Ice Cube, Otis Redding to Chuck D, Curtis Mayfield to KRS-One.

Over the course of 17 tracks, Solemn hurls sharp darts at counterfeits trying to crack his religion, the onslaught of time, and prevaricating rappers—all while paying homage to those who paved the road for him. He bounces off the beats like a trampoline placed in a speakeasy, doubling up on the vocals, burrowing into dense cryptic tangles of slang and then stretching them out with melodic ease.

With dazzling cinematic mise en scene, L’Orange crafts a world that sounds like an old-time medicine show dropped into 90s Brooklyn, with Solemn summoning the holy spirit of Big L. Cymbals crash, drums pound, fuzzy guitars ride out, a bronze rain of horns cascade. This is gorgeous celestial dust, high-powered fuel with every syllable meticulously ordained. Marlowe cracked the case, but how they did it can only become clear under deeper investigation.

10 year anniversary CD edition of this hip hop classic by Kool Keith. Produced by Kutmasta Kurt!

LP comes with 16 page lyric book and 7inch. Produced by Prince Paul, MF DOOM, Mark Ronson, ?uestlove and Memory Man!!
Featuring Open Mike Eagle and Masta Ace.
"If you work with words, like I do, there are a few achievements that we secretly fantasize about. Winning a Nobel Prize in literature. Having a #1 best-seller. College professors teaching our writing in their courses. But one achievement that most of us don’t even fantasize about is having an “original citation” in the Oxford English Dictionary.
The unabridged OED is the compendium of the history of English. Every time a word in common parlance was used for the first time, or in a new way, that usage and its author are recorded in the OED’s endless pages. Shakespeare’s got a bunch. Milton, too. These days, getting an original citation is like hearing the voice of God. It doesn’t happen much. But Paul Barman has one.
This is relevant to (((echo chamber))) only because it indicates the level that MC Paul Barman writes at. His rhymes are original in the sense of “no one has ever used that word like that before… but we will now.” Bring your brains. You’re gonna need them.
Not that (((echo chamber))) is hard work. It is perfectly pleasurable to bop your head along to great tracks laid down by ?uestlove and DOOM and Prince Paul, while MCPB says, “Meat keeps an enemy as a bone-deep identity. It’s the hardened shell that starts to smell. At one time, it might have guarded you well. But maladaptive strengths turn to captive feints and you become your own warden in hell.” And then in the next breath, “Would it blasphemy to ask you to shake that assphemy?”
If your ears are open, MCPB is gonna plug your brain in at voltages to which you are unaccustomed. He’s a social critic with a searing conscience that makes (“my”) comfortable bourgeois house of lies tremble with each jagged line on the PB Richter scale. Comfortable notions of being a “good” white person, blow up in the first two tracks, (((Echo Chamber))) and “YOUNGMAN Speaks on (((Race)))”. It takes MCPB just shy of three minutes to make this semi-observant Jew feel skeptical about the Ten Commandments. In ((((((Antennas)))))) he says, “we feel conflicting agendas rise and fall / what we call our identity tries to synthesize them all.” But he offers a solution, too. You’ll have to listen to the song to hear it. And at the end of the anthemic “Age War,” you’re ready to stand up, cheer, and then go join children in battle against the calcified bankrupt status quo. After all, it’s “already dead. Mentally a baby step from a deli spread.”
But, like any great poet (and MCPB is), he gets personal, too. I am certainly “a self in sheep’s clothing, a wealth of cheap loathing…” Aren’t you?
MC Paul Barman tells us, “Rest assured I’m the crested bird of nested words,” and that is no empty boast. In poetry, to rhyme both at the end of line and internally, in the middle of a line, is showing off. Which makes MCPB a crested bird indeed. There are songs, like (((Believe That))), where your eyes just go wide and you can’t believe the number of rhymes in a row that tell the truth. That much truth all placed in a row—you don’t see that anywhere. And it rhymes, on three levels at once.
MC Paul Barman is the most ambitious type of rapper. He is rhyming art. Why bother? It seems hard, and indeed the long hiatus between his albums tells us that it is. Well, MCPB has a reason: “art is the answer, the be end all... art, art and only art give solace to all this chaos and lonely hearts.”

So take some solace. (((Echo Chamber))) by MC Paul Barman is here. It’ll make your brain spin. And make you check your guts."
--- Adam Gidwitz, New York Times Bestselling & Newbery Award Winning Author

15 tracks by Attica Blues, DJ Krush, Unkle, Howie B ...

When you hear the phrase, “everything’s fine,” we immediately understand it as emotional shorthand. In daily life, we depend on those perfunctory clichés (hope all is well, good to hear from you, etc.) to spare ourselves from the psychological unpacking that the truth requires. For that, there’s art. For that, there’s Everything’s Fine from Jean Grae and Quelle Chris, a jagged, acerbic odyssey that brilliantly riffs on this dystopian zeitgeist.
The thing is, anyone without a lobotomy and a toxic red hat understands that things are definitely not fine. The crush of modern anxiety, the late capitalist scramble to survive, and the brain warp rot of social media has left most of us half crazy.
“We have a dickhead for a president, and before our eyes, racial, religious, and sexual identity rights are moving backwards,” says New York’s (by way of Detroit) Quelle Chris. “Money is still a thing (I’m waiting for Star Trek life to start). There’s war, your kids may be sick, but if someone randomly asks ""how's it going?"" most people will say ""fine.""
Released on Mello Music Group, this album replaces that reflexive cliché with honest and eloquent tangents. It’s specific and subtle in its execution, achieving equilibrium between lackadaisical detours to smell the flowers and the frantic acknowledgement that there’s an inferno raging outside.
If the great political albums are often grim polemics, Everything’s Fine achieves its goals partially through withering satire. See the opening skit, a Prince Paul-style game show in which three contestants (including a futuristic robot) numbly croak that everyone’s fine despite flying high on every imaginable drug, crying themselves to sleep at night and being unemployed for a decade and a half despite having a Master’s in Fine Arts. I promise it’s much funnier than it reads off a screen.
“We’re both perfectionists in different ways,” Jean Grae describes their working relationship. “We both see huge pictures and concepts. So while listening, pay attention to the subtleties, the nuances, the dissonance and the harmony. The conversations and pieces of ourselves in the words, the flows, the beats. All of the open spaces. .Be uncomfortable and be okay with that. Be layered and be okay with that. Be angry and be okay.”
It’s rare to find a record where two rappers are so seamlessly intertwined. Yes, that’s partially a by-product of the teamwork that goes into being in any normal relationship where you wake, sleep, and dream together. But the album also bears the hallmarks of two singular creative geniuses trading bars, collaborating on beats, and combining fun with internal therapy and external observations. It features indelible cameos from Denmark Vessey, Grammy Award winner Anna Wise, Your Old Droog and Big Tone, as well as comics Ashok “Dap” Kondabolu, Michael Che, Nick Offerman, and Hannibal Burress.
In the streaming era, we tend to naturally overlook albums that require multiple listens. This is a record that will grab you on first listen, but it’s greatness only reveals itself through its careful construction, slick wordplay, and esoteric allusions.
On “Zero,” Jean artfully references Rachmaninoff and The Donner Party in the first two bars. With “Scoop A Dirt,” she name-drops the Babadook alongside the truth bomb that Friends was little more than a whitewashed rip off off Living Single. Meanwhile, Quelle balances boasts about bags of cash the size of Chris Christie with poignant existential laments. Somewhere in between, Jean will stealthily slip in jewels like, “it took me until my 30s just to put my finger on it, once you accept the knowledge/solace doesn’t follow/honest.”
It’s a record with only a couple antecedents: De La Soul is Dead, Organized Konfusion’s Stress: The Extinction Agenda, Blackstar, and maybe Cannibal Ox’s Cold Vein. Yet it doesn't sound remotely like any of them. It’s spontaneous and free, yet refined and meticulous. Even if everything is abject, it’s a reminder that music can transcend.
“This album is full of our minds. Our hearts. Our love for production, and words. flow and a lot of musicality,” Jeans says. “We don’t approach topics, issues, writing, or making beats in the same way. I’m harsh, blunt, quick, technical, I arrange classically and play more than I sample. I make joints with 80 tracks. I’m layers upon layers upon layers. Quelle is patient, he’s kinder. More loose and minimalistic. He makes sounds work together that shouldn’t fucking work. How? I have no idea. These are dreams within dreams.”

Rising from the wreckage of a war torn planet, Czarface joins forces with MF Doom in the epic Czarface Meets Metal Face!
Blending Doom's trademark abstractions and Czarface's in-your-face lyrical attack, this album is ripe with cartoon violence, societal observations and pop culture musings. Over banging beats provided by The Czar-Keys, the armored team give you the witty unpredictable treats any hip-hop fan can sink their fangs into.
Expect beats, rhymes, and metal as Czarface controlled by Wu-Tang Clan powerhouse Inspectah Deck and 7L & Esoteric team up with everyone's favorite villain, MF Doom. With track titles like "Nautical Depth","Meddle With Metal", "Astral Traveling"
to "Madness of Badness" this album packs a punch with 16 brand new tracks. Add that with features from Open Mike Eagle and Jedi Mind Tricks' Vinnie Paz, we promise you mind-bending metaphors and brain-melting beats as this powerful pairing sounds off in
March 2018!

Limited edition picture disc of the “Travel At Your Own Pace “instrumentals!

Redefinition brings us the long-awaited instrumental versions of ”Travel At Your Own Pace” by Y Society aka Insight & Damu in conjunction with the “Travel At Your Own Pace 10 Year Anniversary Vinyl Edition”. The album was entirely produced by the Damu The Fudgemunk. This high-quality picture disc pressing is limited to 700 units only worldwide.

A live version of the critically acclaimed 2017 album “The Iceberg,” Oddisee’s masterpiece has been performed around the world. As hehas toured, he has been joined by his band, Good Compny: Olivier St. Louis on guitar, Ralph “Real” Washington on Keys, DJ Unown on MPC, Jon Laine on drums and Dennis Turner on bass.
The first live album release from both Oddisee & Mello Music Group, this project shows what people all over the world already know- Oddisee and Good Compny put on an amazing live show. With bonus tracks from Oddisee’s albums “The Good Fight,” and “People Hear What They See,” this new project breaths life into Oddisee’s catalogue in a way we’ve never heard before.

With the first song of his 2014 masterpiece, Dark Comedy, Open Mike Eagle reintroduced himself by defining his style: “I’m bad at sarcasm so I work in absurdity.” On that album, Mike deconstructed our overstimulated and over-surveilled society with ease and caustic wit. But what do you do when the world warps and bends into a shape so absurd that it can no longer be exaggerated?

Brick Body Kids Still Daydream is a searingly political record for systolic political times. It chronicles the life cycle of the Robert Taylor Homes, a housing project on the South side of Chicago that was demolished completely ten years ago. Families that had lived under the same roof for three generations were forced to scatter, condemned by bureaucrats and faceless cranes and public indifference. Mike Eagle brings the Robert Taylor Homes back to life--literally, with arms and eyes and a head like the dome of a stadium--and fights until the last brick is made to crumble.

As always, Mike slips in and out of various grey areas; on the opener “legendary iron hood,” he raps, “you think it's all good, but it's really a gradient.” The nostalgia (“95 radios”) is a little bit painful, the triumph (“hymnal”) comes through painstaking, incremental work. Everything needs to be earned, even the radio signals that are picked up through tinfoil wrapped on children's hands.

The thesis becomes fully formed on “brick body complex,” where the hook is a towering statement of identity: “Don't call me ‘nigga,’ or ‘rapper,’ my motherfucking name is Michael Eagle.” But this is not a departure from the man-as-building conceit--the flesh and blood and brick and mortar are inextricable.

In case there was any ambiguity about the political and cultural forces that lead to the Robert Taylor Homes’ eventual destruction, Brick Body Kids Still Daydream ends with perhaps the most powerful song of Mike Eagle’s catalog to date. “my auntie’s building” is a tour de force. “They say America fights fair,” he raps. “But they won't demolish your timeshare.” This is the point: the decay and eventual destruction of public housing--and of the physical lives of Black Americans generally--has been normalized in a way that should be grotesquely absurd. “They blew up my auntie’s building / Put out her great-grandchildren / Who else in America deserves to have that feeling? / Where else in America will they blow up your village?”

Production comes courtesy of Exile, Toy Light, Andrew Broder, Illingsworth, DJ Nobody, Kenny Segal, Caleb Stone, Lo-Phi, Elos, and Has-Lo, who produces and guests on “95 radios.” “hymnal” also features a superb turn from Sammus, who maintains the same rhyme scheme throughout her defiant verse.

As grave as the album’s stakes are, it's still anchored by Mike Eagle’s irrepressible sense of humor. (His live comedy show, The New Negroes, is upcoming via Comedy Central.) “no selling” is a hilarious take on practiced indifference, and “TLDR” bridges the economic gap with withering wit: “If you was rich and ‘bout to be broke, I can coach you / ‘Cause I can show you how to kill a roach with a boat shoe.”

Eagle has earned rave reviews in Pitchfork, the LA Weekly, and wherever brilliant, avant-garde rap is appreciated. Brick Body Kids Still Daydream is his most overtly political work to date, and puts to use all the dazzling technical skills he's perfected over more than a decade at the forefront of rap’s underground. In chaotic and increasingly fractured times, it has a few crucial things to bring to your attention.

Every rapper is a struggle rapper. The degree of adversity changes from one tax bracket to the next, but no contract comes with immunity. The pursuit of happiness lasts as long as you do. Stik Figa has been trying to tell you for years.
“Central Standard Time”, the Topeka, KS native’s second official Mello Music Group release, is a meditation on struggles new, old, and eternal. Stik Figa’s rhymes remain intricate yet accessible, the words interlocking to create fresh meanings. Every verse displays his hard-won honesty. Though the pains are personal, the moments are strikingly familiar. These are the songs you play when you’re tired of being told to turn up, when you avoid your bank statement like the plague, when you still can’t shake the first time someone called you “nigger,” when another relationship has wrecked your life.
With production from venerated heavyweights like Nottz, Exile, Black Milk, and Apollo Brown, there is never a stale loop or drum pattern. Beats crafted to fry subwoofers are offset by those warm and poignant. L’Orange produced lead single “Cold,” deftly straddles that divide. Over cavernous drums and a soul-stirring sample, Stik Figa indicts posturing trap rappers with searing wit.
When he’s not dismantling the unoriginal alone, Stik Figa enlists indie luminaries Elzhi, Homeboy Sandman, and Quelle Chris. And on album closer “The Git Down,” he macks alongside Bay Area legend Rappin' 4-Tay. With each feature, the results are even more arresting.
Ultimately, “Central Standard Time” is a reminder that sharing our burdens helps others do the same. It’s rap as therapy, the words written to move forward. Listen and do likewise. Struggle waits for no man.

Limited edition CD!
Produced by J Dilla aka Jay Dee!!
5-Elementz formed in Detroit in 1992. The group met while attending Osborn High School on 7 Mile. The original members consisted of Thyme, Proof, Mudd, Jay Dee & DJ Head.
These great tracks produced by Jay Dee only released on cassette later in 1998. Chopped Herring had access to the original studio DATs and presents to you this great EP. Ya better don’t sleep!

The lead single from the highly sought-after “Travel At Your Own Pace” features the exclusive, previously unreleased B-side, “Pyramids”. This song includes a rare vocal appearance from Damu The Fudgemunk.

This the song's first official reissue and its first appearance pressed on a 45. Both songs packaged in full color double sided cover art.

Known to many as the group Y Society, Insight the Truncator and Damu the Fudgemunk celebrate 10 plus years of friendship and a creative partnership that hold the two in high esteem of their fans. The MC & producer's new 7" is a compelling display of why the duo have always been at the top of their game despite their reserved output since debuting as a team in 2007.

Surprising the world at the top of the year with their full length, "Ears Hear Spears" was a great way to sound the alarm for the excitement of new activity. Selective by nature, Insight and Damu's calculations have served advantageous in making moves and presenting listeners with the right music at the right time. The latest incarnation of this truth can be heard in the previously unreleased b-side track entitled "Pyramids to the Ghetto." Although it was recorded in 2008, it was archived and remained unreleased until now. Now in 2017 this particular song couldn't be any more relevant in how the artists analyze the effects racism of the past & present and its correlation to black plight throughout the Americas (both Insight & Damu drop verses on this track).

Continuing narratives of such legends as Public Enemy and Jeru the Damaja in which the track title quotes, the group individually presents short essays in rhyme form that give a candid account of what they've witnessed as black U.S. citizens living in the 20th and 21st Century. Not only are the social effects on the table for examination, but the positive and negative impacts a racist society has had on black contributions to art and culture are discussed. For the songwriters, "Pyramids to the Ghetto" is therapeutic in which harsh realities are confronted in an unapologetic manner contrasting the previous socially charged material in Insight and Damu's back catalog.

For the listeners, it's a history lesson and a call to motivate us all that history doesn't always have to repeat itself even when it's been the norm for centuries. Adversity and oppression historically have hold some back and made some stronger, but acknowledgement is the first step of progression.

The A-Side, "Never Off (On & On)" speaks on just that. It's a roadmap to dealing with everyday adversity, maintaining faith in self and striving to reach your full potential. Insight presents sermons of encouragement to the everyday person over the Fudgemunk's uplifting beat. The producer chimes in on the chorus with a few words of his own that insists to keep on your path and never fall off. The old saying goes, "Life ain't easy", but the group knows success is not unrealistic. "Never Off (On & On)" was the debut single from the debut album, "Travel at Your Own Pace" which has remained a staple in Insight the Truncator's and Damu the Fudgemunk's legacy.

Old Souls Carnival is the most accomplished Medline’s album so far, presenting his new direction in composition and his multi-instrumentalist approach. The project is driven by a strong spiritual background with a deep 70's soul jazz fusion influence, raised into a movie soundtrack dimension.

Each piece reveals a facet of Medline's music, origins, tastes and character. Playing with shamanic and exotic harmonies, hybridized with distorded psych funk sound and solidely pulsed by unique polyrythmic drum beats.

The natural flows of his expression speaks deeply and truely to the senses, traducing 6 months of gathering emotions, traducing feelings, during meditative recordings sessions on the world evolution and reality. The entire album was produced, mixed and mastered by Medline at the family's house, in Messac, offering a perfect immersion in his spiritual and material universe.

The fabulous and mysterious handmade drawings of Stéphane Carricondo, are the perfect rendition of Medline's mestized artwork. Rich with a wide variety of colors and influences, channeled by Medline's own hands, this first 12" record released on his label My Bags lives up to expectation. This French-Chilean producer always works outside of boundaries and styles frames, and with this LP shows that extraordinary projects can be expected from him for years to come.

Cover and vinyl are close to NM

Debuting on Adult Swim, two of the most conceptual and unusual alternative artists in underground hip-hop have joined forces to tell an absurdist story of culture, art and oppression, set in a light-hearted dystopian future. As adventurous as the concept sounds, the album is musically grounded in hip-hop fundamentals and off the wall lyricism. Joining the duo are artists like DJ QBert, Gonjasufi and Akrobatik. Wyatt Cenac (Daily Show, Bojack Horseman) lends his voice as the narrator of our story.

Vinyl with light scuffs. Cover with slightly bumped corner

These days everything you consume has to be checked - a vibrant outside can hide a genetically modified Frankenstein interior. Finding that 100% organically grown with no artificial rhymes can be difficult. This album is for those looking for something less calculated.

Powerful production runs the range from soulful, funk filled, and hard knocking to cool, laid back easy nodders. The rhymes are politically aware without taking themselves too serious - so from the occasional judo chop to the need for sexy, dirty slutty money - Denmark explores life from the perspective of a man who grew up on minimum wage and butter sandwiches but has grown into a self-aware scholar.

Lyrics don't sugar coat anything -no matter how rough that truth might appear: "The fleek shall inherit the Earth and the meek shall be buried in dirt - ain't nothing sweet." Denmark delivers existential truths while still throwing in a "where the hoes at?" A street savvy album that explores Black love, brutality, capitalism's grip on our daily thoughts, and the connection it all has to our ancestors. Gensu Dean has produced for David Banner, Large Professor, Roc Marciano, and more, while Denmark Vessey has had his praises sung by the likes of Earl Sweatshirt. This is that sh*t to get you through sh*t.

10 tracks feat. Blacastan & Del The Funky Homosapien!

10 tracks feat. Blacastan & Del The Funky Homosapien!

The prodigious 20-year old South East Londoner Tom Misch releases Beat Tape 2 through his own label Beyond The Groove. The project is a soulful extension of the themes explored on Beat Tape 1, this time featuring a host of collaborations including Carmody, the beautifully delicate soulful singer who just happens to be one of his friends older sister; fast-rising wordsmith, Loyle Carner and Melbourne native Jordan Rakei, who since striking a friendship up with Tom online, has taken the plunge and moved from Oz to East Dulwich himself.

All new project by Open Mike Eagle on the mic and Paul White on the boards. Features appearances by Aesop Rock and Future Islands' Hemlock Ernst.