Forrest Armstrong's Blog, page 12

Recontext

"Not until you listen to RKM on a rocky

mountaintop have you heard hip-hop.

Extract the urban element that created it

and let an open wide countryside illustrate it.

The trains and planes could corrupt and

obstruct your planes of thought so that

you forget how to walk through the woods

which ain't good 'cause if you never

walked through the trees listening to Nobody

Beats The Biz then you ain't never heard

hip-hop."

- Saul Williams, The Dead Emcee Scrolls

Alarmed

The sun came out in Portland today! It came out in spurts so it made the cloudy sky look fake bright. To celebrate I thought about going into the woods but didn't. For the next couple weeks I'll be bringing my Swallowdown book to a close, and that feels good. 

I just finished Mike Daily's novel Alarm the other day. I was originally drawn to it at Bizarro Con, where Mike was also in attendance; I saw it came with two CDs and I really don't know many other people trying to work music and...

Gas Monk ten minute blend for y'all to dance to

Just in time for the Saturday night parties, I give you the third Urban Sleep release. This one's different than the others. Better. Instead of one song, one fragment of a mixtape, this one's four songs in one ten minute blend. Lots in there to trip and dance to. Songs are titled: "Turquoise Vertigo on the Horizon" – "Nostalgia, Bad Memory, Resolving" – "Anger Outside of Us and the Vibration" – "Of Machines Humming." Enjoy them, bump 'em at the parties, dance, think, live, etc.

You can...

Thoughts at 4 a.m.

Been making beats for the last five or six hours, I guess… I didn't even realize it. Chopped some breaks for 'em, which I don't normally do. I think I have to start, that shit's fun. This is for the next Urban Sleep package – which is taking a little while because I'm getting kinda ambitious with it. It's turning out to be a ten minute blend, something to trip out and maybe even dance to. But almost done. Maybe tomorrow night. If not, definitely in time for Saturday dance parties.

I miss...

a song for dreamers

J Dilla, "On Stilts." Sure to inspire many a dislocated thought.

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Keep trippin!

By The Time We Leave Here, We'll Be Friends

J. David Osborne's got this beautiful novel in the cooker for Swallowdown Press. I can only tell you what I know, from reading fragments of the manuscript: that it's got some of the strongest prose I've read in a while and that it's about prisoners espcaping Soviet Russia. It's comin' out 2010 and we're all hyped as shit for it - his unique style's a neccesary element to the Swallowdown scheme as masterminded by Mr. Jeremy Robert Johnson. Something came along today that got me even more...

Gasoline Skink!

Jase and I just started getting busy making Gasoline Skink, our collabo music project. First song came together last night. I don't know exactly how long it'll be until the first full mixtape is finished, but judging from the fact that both of us are seriously addicted to making music anyways, we'll probably be quick.

There will be maybe three more Urban Sleep songs coming out individually in anticipation of the mixtape; after that, we'll be releasing Gasoline Skink songs that way...

nobody inspires me as much as Madlib

No writer, filmmaker, blah blah blah anything, for real. Madlib is ceaslessly creative and prolific, apparently making up to an hour of new music every day. A lot of people get down with his projects like Madvillian and Quasimoto, but this guy can do anything, and never stops trying to do everything his brain tells him to do. Every artist trying to get their work on can learn so much from him. Plus he's just a real dude. Like…

Just wake up, smoke...

I Dream in Different Blacks

Here's the second Urban Sleep mixtape + excerpt package, "I Dream in Different Blacks." This beat was crazy to make. I've never done so much for a single piece, never had so many channels and so many effects and filters blah blah blah going into one song as I did with this, not even with something like the "Eraserhead Beat Symphony." Fortunately, you'll never even hear most of what went into this song. I remember the look on my friend's face a few days ago when I showed him the midpoint...

Asphalt Flowerhead in distanceswimmer

A pretty cool review of  Asphalt Flowerhead came up on a website called distanceswimmer a few days ago. I like it, particularly for how much it tries to explain what the book's all  about (something I suck at doing). I just don't seem to stop getting compared to Dali and Burroughs – Burroughs especially. But that's all good.

Check out the review here. You can buy Asphalt Flowerhead at Amazon.