Update: DJ Etronik from Pico Rivera, California, ended up taking home honors over the weekend as the winner of this year’s DMC US Finals in NYC. This Saturday, August 7, another chapter will be added to the annals of hip-hop history in New York City. On what will presumably be…
Spoke In Wordz is a rapper with a background rooted in the structure of poetry. His flow is notably diverse. Like one of his major inspirations, Guru, Spoke uses a velvety voice to deliver his lyrics, but he also spits in Spanish, lightning-fast, with a tone used to provoke thought…
Lest the rest of the country think we’re merely home to indie rock goodness like Candy Claws and sugary sweet electro-pop confections like 3OH!3 or Breathe Carolina, Allegaeon’s new album, Fragments of Form & Function, issued two weeks ago on the storied Metal Blade Records imprint, should help dispel any…
See also: Input on how SupaHotBeats convinced him to share his harrowing Columbine experience These days, older terms like “backpack rap” and “college rap” have become interchangeable with markers like “conscious hip-hop” and “alt hip-hop,” as ways to attempt to describe and categorize hip-hop that’s thoughtful and introspective. While Input’s…
Ansel Adams, famous for capturing a multitude of black-and-white landscape photographs — many of which likely adorn the walls of your dentist’s office — once said, “You don’t take a photograph. You make it.” Seetwist Productions lives, breathes, shoots and essentially embodies those words by profiling some of the most…
From the Dirty South of the ATL to the fields of Kentucky and Nebraska to places as far away as South Africa, rapper and musician Proxy has been many places sharing his music and his service. Throughout his travels, though, Proxy says he became the man he felt he was…
The music of Miniature Tigers sounds like it has its roots in the sunnier, more upbeat end of ’60s guitar rock, utilizing spare melodies with melodic atmospheres that have an nostalgic immediacy — as though your future self could sing a song to you with words of compassion and comfort…
Nofrendo (aka Joseph Meezy) is the beat making equivalent of Nina Simone. Built on his love for soul and all things raw and gritty, his production style begets welcoming anachronistic melodies. Quite different from the sped up soul sample moves of many producers, he takes the properties of a record…
Reverend Deadeye started his wild-eyed, tent revival, country-gospel-blues one-man band in 2002, just as one his previous projects, the dark, gnarled post-punk outfit, the Bedraggled, was coming to an end. Embracing the music he grew up with as a child on a northeastern Arizona reservation, Reverend Deadeye (aka Brent Burkhart)…
Nautical Mile first caught our attention back in July of 2009 , and since then has pretty much destroyed any notions people might have had about the quality of local music. With a slew of some of the most radio-friendly pop rock songs to ever come out of Colorado, Nautical…
Spoken Intellekt and the rag tag band of MCs known as The Famm are fast becoming one of the more notable names in the Colorado Springs underground hip-hop scene. After forming in ’08, they’ve worked the local circuit fiercely, and if you’ve gone to see anyone from People Under The…
DJ KAAOS stands apart from the crowd with his arms full of tattoos, toting stacks of record crates (which apparently require a dolly). As a DJ, he’s fully committed to respecting the past, while also forging his way into the future with MF KAAOS (and no, that isn’t an MF…
All right, how many times have you been bopping along, minding your own business, listening to some tunes, when all of the sudden, you’ll hear a line in a song that instantly makes you do a double-take? You know, the ones where you keep rewinding the sucker, marveling aloud to…
Mike D. Chill is somewhat of a Denver legend. Since his days forming the Kut-N-Kru Record label with Gary “Scratch G” Martinez and Jeff “Apostle” Campbell, he’s been putting it down for raunchy, strip-club girls and low-rider, bass crazed homies alike. After nearly two decades, Chill says he’s “Still in…
In 1988, Belgian electronic artist Maurice Engelen released a song under the name Praga Khan called “Sit on Acid,” and it became something of an international dance club hit. Ultimately that aesthetic and sound became what is now known as Lords of Acid. The unvarnished sexual themes of Lords of…
DJ Cavem Moetavation (aka Ietef Vita) is out to green the ‘hood, one hip-hop element at a time. Activist, b-boy, DJ, MC, graffiti artist, beat-boxer, film maker and journalist, Cavem plays many roles, all geared toward empowering the ‘hood with tools that facilitate evolution of the mind. And musically, Cavem…
Whether or not these Park Hill natives rode the short bus to school is irrelevant, because there is no doubt that these crazy bastards are the ones your mom told you not to play with. This eclectic group of MCs, producers and DJs use Shortbus as their outlet for their…
H*Wood: Heard of him? If not, in the words of my man Clinton Sparks, better get familiar. H*Wood — or Brandon Bordeaux, as he’s known to his family — may be among the first Colorado-bred hip-pop dudes in the new decade to make a splash nationally. Born in Aurora and…
Boonie Mayfield (aka Solomon Vaughn) is one of the hottest emerging hip-hop producers in the game. And that’s not just us talking. While it’s true: He is one of our favorite beat makers; it’s not just us who are smitten Boonie’s beats. For the past two years, Boon Doc has…
Xperiment (aka Courtland Urbano) is an out of this world supersonic architect of sound. His beats are a perfect synthesis between a test to discover or prove the unknown and the balance of validating tried and true methods, threading analog sounds through digital components. Xperiment’s beats are accessible to the…
In this week’s Rough Mixes entry, we got a much needed introduction to Ariel Rosenberg, the creative force behind Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti. He has a reputation for being a bit of a pistol, but now that we’ve felt him out, we feel comfortable digging a little deeper. In this…
Founded in 2009, the Dead Weather had a bit of a leg up for a new band. But then all its members came together from other well-known projects: Jack White, who decided to take up the drums once again for this band, is famous, of course, for his stints in…
