The late producer J Dilla’s ability to re-oxygenate creaky soul samples is often celebrated as one of his preeminent gifts, but it reflected only a portion of his body of work.

Less analyzed but equally important was the legendary beat maker's ability to seamlessly infuse the automaton funk and fractured experimentation of electronic music pioneers such as Raymond Scott, Giorgio Moroder and the Belleville Three (Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson and Juan Atkins).

Even less known was Dilla’s love of vocoder pioneer Bruce Haack, a Julliard-schooled, peyote-ingesting polymath from Alberta, Canada. Largely obscure to mass audiences in his lifetime, Haack's appearances on “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” “The Mike Douglas Show” and “The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson” fostered his reputation as a kooky uncle playing extraterrestrial-sounding synths to dazzled audiences a decade before Kraftwerk.

Like Dilla himself, Haack was an inscrutable shapeshifter impossible to pigeonhole. He spent most of the 1960s and '70s switching between children’s music, experimental rock operas and acid-rock synth opuses. His collected output runs the gamut from Roald Dahl at his weirdest, Tangerine Dream being covered by Kraftwerk and Devo on strong drugs. Sampled by Cut Chemist and covered by Beck and Stereolab, Haack’s work remains the right kind of weird 22 years after his death.

If no description is more overused than “visionary,” Haack is one of the few artists worthy of the word. Even his swan song, 1982’s “Party Machine,” telescoped toward the future, with Haack collaborating with a young Russell Simmons to create a funky vocoder jam that would probably warp Kanye West’s circuits if he heard it today. The tune is collected with all of Haack’s seminal work on the Stones Throw-released “Farad: The Electric Voice,” a compilation named after his trusted homemade vocoder.

It was executive-produced by Peanut Butter Wolf, who was first exposed to Haack via a road trip with Dilla and Madlib. An instant convert, he’s fittingly remixed Haack’s “Stand Up Lazarus,” a song that references a biblical parable about a man who rises from the grave. Haack isn’t about to escape the cemetery anytime soon, but the stellar “Farad” ensures that his music will get a second lifetime.

-- Jeff Weiss

Download: (Pop & Hiss Premiere)
MP3: Bruce Haack -- "Stand Up Lazarus (Peanut Butter Wolf Remix)"

MP3: Bruce Haack -- "Electric to Me Turn"

Slightly more than a decade ago, Stones Throw titan Peanut Butter Wolf dropped "My Vinyl Weighs a Ton," a crate-digging classic that remains one of the seminal statements of the Underground golden era. Even by 1999, San Jose-bred Wolf, birth name Chris Manak, had already assembled an army of wax that deserved its own ZIP Code (at least, according to popular folklore).

But to paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson, once you get into a serious record collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can. Thus, Wolf remains a vinyl junkie, even though among the Stones Throw family (Madlib, Egon, J-Rocc, et. al), they probably own every record you've ever heard of, and tons more you haven't.

Thus, regulars at endangered L.A. record stores may have seen a familiar sight last week: Manak trawling the used record bins of Amoeba, Freakbeat, Counterpoint, Records LA, and Rockaway for 45s, in preparation for this Sunday's 10-10-10 celebration. A yearly ritual that began with 2006's 6-6-06 Heavy Metal set, each year has had a different theme. 2007 featured seven events in seven days, including the 7-7-07 Gospel set. 2008 and 2009 topped that with eight- and nine-day marathons that obviously would prove unsustainable as the century progressed.

Thankfully, Manak has spared himself, scaling down the festivities for this Sunday's event to a 10-hour, 10-DJ mini-festival, with all 45 sets from himself, Dam-Funk, Prince Paul, Baron Zen, Danny Holloway, J-Rocc, Madlib, Mayer Hawthorne, Mahssa, and Rhettmatic. Previously scheduled to have been held at downtown's Sex, the location has been switched to 740 S. Broadway. The show starts at 4 p.m. and goes until 2 a.m.. $10 before 6 p.m. and $20 thereafter.

In honor of the festivities, Wolf has crafted a mix, premiered here, consisting exclusively of records he scooped up in the last 10 days. It runs the gamut between psych rock, boogie funk, post-punk and more, and it's predictably excellent. If it's not a 10/10, it's close.

-- Jeff Weiss

Photo credit: Peanut Butter Wolf

Download: (Pop & Hiss Exclusive)

 
ZIP: Peanut Butter Wolf-"10/10/10 Mix" (Left-Click)

 

The Stones Throw impresario Peanut Butter Wolf has pulled impressive feats of numerically themed DJing in recent years, gallavanting across L.A. to spin wax in all styles at all sorts of venues. On Oct. 10,  though, he'll up the stakes again with a sprawling event featuring 10 Stones Throw-adjacent DJs rolling deep for a 10-hour set. And just to be difficult, they'll spin only vinyl 45s.

All the lineup and venue info will be announced 10 days before the set (that would be Thursday), so go ahead and get your dispensary orders placed early.

-- August Brown

Photo by Los Angeles Times

Dam Funk's hood pass remains so durable that he can wear a velvet fedora, smoke cloves, sip daiquiris and still be beloved everywhere from San Pedro to Chatsworth. Many cannot do such things, but then, most haven't collaborated with MC Eiht and Westside Connection. Nor do we properly understand how to wield a vocoder, the soundtrack to L.A. anthems since the days of Zapp and the Egyptian Lover. And indeed, Dam-Funk is the rightful heir to their throne -- a polymath able to play the keytar and the talkbox, and DJ obscure boogie jams with obscene and innate levels of funk.

Directed by Henry DeMaio, the video for "Hood Pass Intact" captures a day in the life of Damon Riddick. The conceit was simple. Follow him around with cameras as he goes through his daily routine, which involves coffee in diners, getting down at the Funkmosphere, buying vintage gear and passing out ice cream to local children.

And for those questioning why he'd wear a Pittsburgh Pirates cap in a video celebrating L.A. life, he's repping his native Pasadena.  Essentially, it proves that he's the funk Ferris Bueller. But don't expect to see him tooling around in a Ferrari 250 GT anytime soon. Dam's more of a vintage Chrysler Cordoba man -- which is to be expected from someone whose hood pass is inalienable.

-- Jeff Weiss

Download:
MP3: Dam Funk ft. MC Eiht -- "Hood Pass Intact"

  

A consensus seems to be growing that Los Angeles is in the midst of a renaissance for independent music. In a recent Sunday feature, we set out to discover just how it is that while the major labels continue to suffer layoffs and severe sales losses, this city’s scrappy, savvy, taste-driven indie imprints have, in fact, been thriving. As a corollary to that, we’ve spoken to and profiled 12 of L.A.’s most active young labels, from artist-owned black metal powerhouse Southern Lord to chart-climbing indie rock outlet Danger Bird to progressive hip-hop imprint Anticon. Here’s hoping they’ll all end up in a GZA song some day.

Sargent House (Echo Park)
Longtime talent manager Cathy Pellow started Sargent House in 2006 with one artist: Seal Beach prog-punk band Rx Bandits, who were ready to call it quits after selling around 150,000 records through MCA/Geffen and, according to Pellow, "never seeing a penny." Today, her stable comprises "a middle class of awesome musicians," also proggily inclined, able to live off their earnings. She also manages a sister label co-run by the Mars Volta’s Omar Rodriguez Lopez.

Michael Jackson died a year ago Friday, and since then, hundreds if not thousands of artists have paid tribute to his legacy in song. Of course, paying homage to the King of Pop is a notoriously tricky enterprise, considering the difficulty of topping the genuine article. Wisely, Oh No and Aloe Blacc opt to honor with him tunes diametrically opposed to the original versions.

So we’re one month from summer. You’re debating if this will be the year you finally give up and cut some jeans off into shorts. You’re beginning the delicate dance of buttering up all your long-lost friends with backyard pools. The Coachella drugs have finally abated, and you’re ready to eat food again, perhaps even the kind cooked outside over fire.

This all means one thing. It’s time for you to update the funk section in your life. It’s a rite of L.A. seasonal passage, darnit.

To those ends, may we humbly suggest “California Funk: Rare Funk 45s From the Golden State,” a new compilation from the consistently amazing Stones Throw imprint Now Again (who, in a belated 2010 resolution, I need to write about far more often.)

True to the label’s mission, the compilation is rife with long-forgotten singles airlifted from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s heyday of local funk. As a document of an era, it’s almost startling to hear the volatility and thrill in this music – it took the swing and soul of R&B and made into something sharper, driven by sex and politics in equal measure. These are the seeds that would grow into Dr. Dre and E-40 and that took James Brown’s explosive prowess and gave it fangs.

Westfield Culver City is the quintessential late 20th century American mall. A sprawling, multilevel maze of everything from a Cinnabon to a Radio Shack, the mall formerly known as Fox Hills also has a bit of an unfortunate history, and has recently undergone a massive transformation.

In an effort to revitalize the shopping center to reflect the improvements in the area, a reported $180 million was sunk into the recent transformation of the Westfield Culver City. All of which made the free KCRW-sponsored concert by emerging soul sensation Mayer Hawthorne an improbably special event.


Mall concerts have been historically predominated by industry-driven potential teen sensations (see Tiffany’s fame-generating “The Beautiful You: Celebrating The Good Life Shopping Mall Tour” of 1987). But on Saturday, an impressive crowd of fans and unsuspecting shoppers alike found themselves enthralled with Hawthorne's snappy, Motown-inspired blue-eyed soul.

If you listen closely, you can hear the sound of the Los Angeles chapter of the Hip-Hop Nation collectively holding its breath. All they have to go on is a blunt, simple announcement on the website of L.A. indie hip-hop label Stones Throw:

“Announcing:
Madvillain Live in Los Angeles
November 21, 2009 at the We The People festival

More info coming soon”

First things first: An actual live appearance by masked rapper MF Doom (one-half of Madvillain, alongside L.A. producer Madlib), who in this humble scribe’s honest opinion is among the greatest rappers alive, is akin to a Bigfoot sighting. Particularly over the last couple of years, after a series of scheduled MF Doom shows in 2007 descended into near-riots when the man onstage wearing the mask appeared to be someone other than Daniel Dumile (the rapper’s real name). Adding insult to injury, the supposed impostor seemed to be lip-synching.

“Everything that we do is villain style. Everybody has the right to get it or not get it,” was the closest Doom came to addressing the issue in Rolling Stone earlier this year. “Once I throw it out, it’s there for interpretation. It might’ve seemed like it didn’t go well, but how do we know that wasn’t just pre-orchestrated so that we’re talking about it now?”

Only time will tell whether Doom will end up onstage at this year’s edition of the We the People festival, which last year was a hit-or-miss affair with a solid lineup (including Suicidal Tendencies, Flying Lotus and RZA), but was marred by failing sound equipment and scheduling issues.

Expect more information in the coming weeks. And For Doom fans, fingers crossed.

-- Scott T. Sterling