“Living in Philly provided a context for a lot of soul music that I had liked,” RJD2 says on the city’s influence on Dame Fortune’s sound. “I didn’t have any cultural context for this music that I liked—it was just music that I had stumbled across as a beat making nerd. Philly was a place where there were enough people who had the same musical vocabulary that I did, which made the music more than something I had just discovered on my own.”

Listen below to debut single, “Peace of What,” which features Jordan Brown and draws inspiration from 1990s rap legends Main Source’s 1991 single “Peace Is Not the Word to Play.” “When I hear people talk of peace in America, the discrepancy between our words and our actions can get fatiguing,” he says on the inspiration behind the song. “I was trying to reflect the experience of people I know, which often feels like ‘We’re not ACTUALLY trying to do anything about this problem in our country.’”

Thought-provoking and undeniably entertaining all at once, this latest exhibition of musical virtuosity is a crystal-clear reflection of RJD2’s cinematic aspirations, reminding listeners that it’s always rewarding to expect the unexpected. RJD2 will tour throughout 2016 in support of Dame Fortune and his 20-year-plus-career.

Catullus

Catullus is a genre defying band base out of Philadelphia. Comprised of five talented musicians with a drive to create more than just music, Catullus aims to ignite a vibe that makes each experience and show special. Each member brings something unique to the table resulting in the end product; an unparalleled sound!

Breaking the gridlock of society’s label on “genres”, Catullus successfully blends a flavorful pocket of progressive, funk, electronic dance grooves, and good ol’ fashioned rock n roll.

Appearing throughout the Philadelphia and Northeast region, they have shared the stage with the likes of Conspirator, Papadosio, Brother’s Past, Suckerpunch, Jimkata, Jesse Miller and Mike Greenfield (Lotus), and Splintered Sunlight to name a few.

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At the age of 10, his family decided to move to the south of Puerto Rico, where he was first introduced to the musical sounds of that land that caught his attention and he began to take refuge in music at such a young age. During his educational development on the island, he showed interest in sports, especially basketball, so he decided to learn more about physical education.

How did he become known in the music industry? It was not until 2003, that his first musical opportunity arose, participating in the production Blin Blin Vol. 1, where he made a musical collaboration with the duo Wisin y Yandel titled “No Pierdas Tiempo”. This collaboration opened the way for him to work with other colleagues in the genre.

His musical career began to rise with the song “Quizás”, which is part of the album ‘Wisin y Yandel Presentan: Los Vaqueros’, released in 2006 and featured collaborations with great urban artists. The song was one of the album’s biggest hits, and made him a force in reggaeton.

Two years later, Tony Dize achieved an important step in his career: the release of his debut album titled “La melodía de la Calle” (2008) under the WY Records label. The album managed to enter one of the most important charts of Billboard magazine, the Billboard 200 chart and also positioned in the Top 10 of Top Latin Albums. The hit “Permítame” featuring Yandel is included in this project that launched the artist to conquer the music industry as a solo artist.

For Tony, 2009 was a pivotal year in his career. He made a big change by signing with a new record label, Pina Records. In this new facet he released his second musical production “La Melodía de la Calle: Updated”. The album reached #1 in sales the week of its release and his biggest hit “El Doctorado”, opened many doors internationally and quickly conquered the radio charts and set a new record in his musical history by entering the Top 10 of Billboard’s Hot Latin Songs chart.

As an artist Tony Dize considers himself to be quite open and always gives the opportunity to his partners for the creativity of his albums. During 10 years of career he has worked with the best DJs of the genre such as Luny Tunes, Naldo, Urba y Monserrate, Notty, and Noriega.

This year 2015, Tony is preparing for the big release of his third studio album titled ‘Duele el Amor’. The new musical proposal contains 17 songs and includes the artist’s most recent tracks such as: “Prometo Olvidarte”, “No Pretendo Enamorarte”, “Ruleta Rusa” and “Duele el Amor”. These singles have been strongly positioned in the radio charts. The production contains a variety of urban music songs with romantic lyrics and even some very danceable songs for nightclubs. The album will be available in April.

For Tony Dize, music has been an inspiration all his life and he is always grateful to his audience, to whom he promises to continue making good music, especially with the new album ‘Duele el Amor’.

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Once compared to Leonard Cohen, Tom Petty, Psychic TV, and Animal Collective in the same review (for 2009’s Childish Prodigy), Kurt can bring to mind anything from Suicide to Leo Kottke to My Bloody Valentine, Bob Seger, Nick Drake, and Eastern ragas. Still, he pieces together these disparate elements so seamlessly and unpretentiously that such reference points are rendered pointless by the singularity of his sound. Kurt Vile might belong to a long lineage of classic American songwriters, but he’s the only one who’s alive and in his prime today.

This is the fourth time Kurt Vile has put an album’s worth of songs together and stuck a name on it, but in a sense Smoke Ring For My Halo is his first real album – every flinching guitar arpeggio and vocal wander was made to be here, made with this record in mind, to sit alongside another in situ and in sequence. It seems weird saying this given the amount of ground he’s covered already, but Smoke Ring For My Halo is the perfect way into the music Kurt Vile makes. It’s tender and evocative, elusive but companionable, tough in the gut and the arm but swollen in the chest and giddy in the head. It’s a record that is perfect for any given day during whatever season, to satisfy all moods in every possible scenario – be that first thing in the morning or last thing at night; today, tomorrow or five years from now.

In short, it’s real. Kurt Vile isn’t just the loneliest of ten siblings born to parents on the outskirts of Philadelphia, the former forklift truck driver who makes rock band guitar songs in the solitude of his bedroom. Smoke Ring For My Halo brings all of that together, marrying the introspection of the nocturnal stoner with the exploration of a troubadour frontiersman to arrive at a record you know is so much more than the sum of his and its constituent parts because often he sounds like he doesn’t know how he got there himself.

RTX are splitting into Black Bananas!!! The fruit is ripe and the bread will be FRESH.
After three albums under the name RTX, Jennifer Herrema and her bunch decided to flip the script, to kick open the doors of perception a little bit . See,RTX was not Royal Trux, not a metal band,not a 70’s bar band and not a toxic substance; RTX was something, all of those things and none of them and way more, including Black Bananas bubbling in a witchy cauldron of their own herbaceousbrew. The tit le of a song on their RaTX album detailed a bit of the recipe, taking elements often tossed aside or thrown all the way out and combining them into something new and worthwhile…a new strain of the almighty green – to feed and elevate the hungry ones.

“I’m your garbage collector
I’ll turn your trash to gold
What you cast off is what I hold,
End loafs of bread, black bananas and broken crackers
Scratched records, too dark pictures and torn jeans
All the shit that rips at the seams”

Black Bananas is set for the next all-inclusive rock and roll crusade, the one that includes even and especially all the shit you don’t like, woven into all the shit you can’t live without. This has been the name of Jennifer’s game from day one; she owns the blueprints and if you don’t know by now, don’t even bother to Google it, cuz understanding is an investment not an action. Jennifer Herrema is not schizophrenic nor does she don many hats. She is simply a singer and simultaneously, a pioneer of comprehensive non-exclusive opposition rock, and Black Bananas is the latest addition to the oeuvre.
Brian Mckinley, Kurt Midness, Jaimo Welch , and Nadav Eisenman have been ripping and running with Jennifer since 2002, when one by one, they gathered serendipitously, borne by curiosity and the courage to be part of something new. Each passing RTX record saw them wrapped ever tighter in the burgeoning tongue of their own creation. Now, uttering their twisted slang fluently as a unified dialect, they emerge as Black Bananas.

If you wanna hedge (-fund) your bets its best to get out in front of this new natio nal currency they are creating with Black Bananas. These are the notes of the future; with Jennifer at the helm their worth will grow exponentially. Invest!

Black Bananas first album Rad Times Xpress IV runs the gamut from gnarly odes to reality TV in songs like “My House” to future electric metallic GoGo sounds all conceived with scraps of influence from Jennifer’s childhood passions zig-zagged with other currents out there, creating a sound that will take you to a specific place that only Black Bananas know how to find.
Most of all, Black Bananas is the new band in town – and they’re fucking righteous.

Over the past two decades, we’ve been bombarded with grunge, with shoegaze, with sludge, with doom metal, with post-rock, with slow-core, with all these examples of loud rock music that reach towards one extreme or another, the sole intent of which seems to be to bludgeon the listener into accepting what they conceive to be a “total sound,” one which makes their effort more valid than the others around it, and by association, worthy of your reverence.

Denton, TX trio True Widow plays against type. Listen closely to their new double album As High As the Highest Heavens and From the Center to the Circumference of the Earth
and you’ll notice something rare: a band that plays to the notions of the genres mentioned above, one which embodies the best characteristics of each but never repeats something that’s been done. The understanding of space, balance, and method exhibited by True Widow is different enough to avoid the trappings of genres done to death; special enough to revere, and to pull away from memories of sounds that once wore you down.

Here is a band that has figured out how to play music that is traditionally recognized as “heavy” and “slow,” on traditional rock instruments, in a way that few have been able to accomplish: a melancholy, meditative approach to songwriting and soundscape that draws you in. They figured this out in the space of one album, a self-released, self-titled debut from 2008. On As High As the Highest Heavens, they refine the work even further.

Big guitar, bigger drums and the biggest bass (played by D.H., Slim, and Nikki, respectively) effortlessly recreate the unending skies of prairie America, where storms blow across with fury, horizons are unencumbered by the choke of skyscrapers and electric light, and the atmosphere pushes you down. A rumbling backdrop of distortion churns away, both behind and within True Widow’s plaintive song structures, but never overpowers it. Across a 50-minute runtime, the nine songs here range from excavated alt-rock anthems (“Night Witches,” “Skull Eyes”) to methodical epics like “Boaz” and “Blooden Horse,” to triumphant bulldozers of sound like “NH,” which splits the difference between dirge and hymn, the instruments staring into the ground while D.H. and Nikki’s voices ascend to the clouds.

Plenty of you may balk at both the length and largesse expressed in the title of True Widow’s new album, but once its powers seep into your skull, you’ll likely find it impossible to doubt the magnitude of what’s at stake here – a band that is singlehandedly breaking rank from accepted genres, and carving its own path into history.

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Vai’s work has been recognized with a long list of awards, including an even dozen from Guitar Player. Most recently, the TEC Foundation honored him with the prestigious Les Paul Award, created in 1991 to salute those who have set the highest standard of excellence in the creative application of technology. Past winners include Paul McCartney, Neil Young, Herbie Hancock, Steely Dan, and Bob Clearmountain. In bestowing it on Vai, TEC noted, “Steve Vai’s sheer breathtaking facility on the guitar is acclaimed in the rock world and beyond… Vai has dedicated his talents to creatively advance the language of music. While many artists fit easily into a single category, Steve Vai remains unclassifiable. He is a musical alchemist of the highest order.”

The latest product of Vai’s alchemy is 2012’s The Story of Light, his 16th solo album. It follows up the 2009 live tour de force Where the Wild Things Are, and comes out on Favored Nations Entertainment, founded by Vai in 1999 to present works by musicians who have “attained the highest performance level on their chosen instruments.” The label’s roster features artists including Tommy Emmanuel, Steve Lukather, Eric Johnson, Billy Sheehan, and Larry Carlton, and more than 70 releases.

Vai’s full discography encompasses more than 60 albums, including many with Zappa, others from his stints with David Lee Roth (just after he left Van Halen) and Whitesnake—at the peak of its popularity—live releases, collaborations, compilations, and orchestral works. Highlights include 1990’s groundbreaking Passion and Warfare, and 2007’s Sound Theories Vol. 1 & 2, performed with the Netherlands’ Metropole Orkest. Vai’s other orchestral compositions include “The Middle of Everywhere,” which had its world premiere in 2011 with the Noord Nederlands Orkest, whose director Marcel Mandos said, “Steve Vai’s music can easily compete with that of famous contemporary composers.”

The Story of Light follows the cosmic journey of a man driven mad by grief, intertwining tragedy, revelation, enlightenment, and redemption. It continues a narrative arc begun on Vai’s 2005 album Real Illusions: Reflections (his last solo studio release). Largely instrumental, The Story of Light spotlights guest vocalists including singer-songwriter Aimee Mann—dueting with Vai on “No More Amsterdam,” which she also co-wrote—and Beverly McClellan, a season one finalist on The Voice, appearing on “John the Revelator.” The track was inspired by a vintage recording of blues singer Blind Willie Johnson, whose acid-soaked vocals are sampled in the mix as well.

Throughout, Vai’s lead guitar lines bend sounds and listeners’ minds in equal measure. Looking ahead, he envisions a third set of songs that will unravel the mysteries and reveal truths woven through The Story of Light and its predecessor. The completed trilogy, envisioned as cinematic—even operatic—in scope, will include lyrics, narration, and visuals.

Vai’s signature instruments include the Ibanez JEM guitar, which he designed in 1985 with first-of-its-kind features including the floating tremolo and the monkey grip. The JEM is now one of the longest running, most successful signature series guitars in history, and for over a decade its sister model—the RG—is second in worldwide sales only to the Fender Stratocaster. Also for Ibanez, Vai designed “The Universe,” the first commercial 7-string electric guitar. This instrument inspired a revolutionary metal subculture that started in the mid ’90s. Among his many other innovative collaborations with equipment manufacturers, he designed the Steve Vai Legacy V3 series of all-tube amplifiers with Carvin Corporation.

In the film realm, Vai has credits including Executive Producer for the acclaimed 2008 Hank Garland biopic Crazy, in which he also appears as Hank Williams. In the 1986 feature Crossroads, inspired by the legend of blues icon Robert Johnson, he appears as Jack Butler, “the devil’s guitarist”—and collaborated with Ry Cooder on the music scenes.

In 1998, Vai established (with Ruta Sepetys) the Make a Noise Foundation to provide instruments and music education to young musicians without means. “Music educates the whole person as an integrated individual. It educates the mind, the senses, and the emotions,” says Vai. “Those interested in music should not have to sacrifice their ability to develop important skills and express emotions due to limited financial resources.” A Steve Vai Guitar Scholarship will be awarded in 2012 as part of a collaboration between Make A Noise and the Musicians Institute College of Contemporary Music.

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