D ‘Angelo is a morning person, of sorts. When he’s working in the studio, as was often the case in the 14-year interregnum between 2000’s Voodoo and 2014’s Black Messiah, he quits his all-night recording sessions just in time to greet each day’s sunrise. “I’m definitely on the night shift,” he says, drawing deep on one of a series of Newport cigarettes, not long after midnight in the midtown Manhattan studio where he recorded much of Black Messiah. He’s wearing a denim shirt unbuttoned over a white undershirt, dark jeans and leather boots. Dog tags bearing the names of his three children hang from a chain around his neck. He looks weary, though he woke up not long ago. It’s his first interview since he released one of the most universally acclaimed albums in years, an album that seemed as if it might never come out at all. D’Angelo could well be the most singular, visionary star to emerge from R&B since Prince. His music, stuffed with live instrumentation and harmonic … [Read more...] about The Second Coming of D’Angelo
Bb15 vikas gupta comes to karan kundrras defence after he gets blamed for his toxic relationship with tejasswi
Blood Brothers: Inside the Music of ‘The Knick’
W hen Steven Soderbergh began work on The Knick – his gritty, historical medical series for Cinemax, set in New York City in 1900 – he enjoyed replicating the era’s look, fashion and stomach-churning surgical practices. But one of the few things that was far too ghastly to replicate was the music. “Oh, it was horrible,” he says with a laugh. “Aesthetically, it’s a really cool period, but the music was absolutely boring and not interesting. Ragtime had just started – and there’s a tiny bit of that in the background of some scenes – but other than that, there was nothing good.” So the director turned to the only person he thought could give The Knick a unique sound: his frequent collaborator, Cliff Martinez. As the director filmed the show, he had been using shimmery EDM flourishes that Martinez had written for the 2012 teensploitation flick Spring Breakers and some of the composer’s wiry synth lines from his own 2011 pandemic disaster film, Contagion , as temporary … [Read more...] about Blood Brothers: Inside the Music of ‘The Knick’
D’Angelo F-cking Loves Playing ‘Red Dead Redemption 2’
There are few contemporary working artists who maintain a more idiosyncratic release schedule than D’Angelo . He’s famous for tinkering and revising his music, eating up years and hundreds of reels of analog tape on his way to an eventual album. It took him 14 years to follow up 2000’s smash hit Voodoo with his most recent album, Black Messiah . In that time, three U.S. presidents occupied the White House, Facebook was invented, and D’Angelo released precisely zero songs. So it was a surprise when a new D’Angelo track titled “ May I? Stand Unshaken” quietly appeared on YouTube recently. Even more startling: In many of the bootleg clips D’Angelo’s new song soundtracks footage from the wildly popular video game Red Dead Redemption 2 . That’s because the only way listeners can legitimately get their hands on “May I? Stand Unshaken,” which has not been officially released yet, is by buying a copy of the game. “Even RCA [D’Angelo’s label] had no idea we were … [Read more...] about D’Angelo F-cking Loves Playing ‘Red Dead Redemption 2’