It’s summer and things have slowed down a bit on the blog end of things but that doesn’t mean that we’re not keeping the party going. This coming and every Tuesday we’re doing it up at Sully’s in Hartford so come on down. Also, we’ve got nothing to announce yet but keep your eyes peeled for some more ragers at Mad Dawg’s. Here’s a preview.
Jun 16
2011 Grand Band Slam Kick Off
It’s summer and we’re kicking it off with a Thursday of great music at Sully’s Pub in partnership with the Hartford Advocate. We have local and favorite and our boy Benn Grim with HPSU DJs Dirty D. and PK Ripper as well as a bunch of other local talent. Show starts at 5 pm and goes all night. Come happy hour it up with your friendly neighborhood party starters.
Jun 13
Let’s Get Wavy
Tomorrow, Tuesday the 14th at Sully’s. Get amped!
Summer is near and its time to start partying outside again!!! Join us as we return to Sully’s to blast some beats every Tuesday night at the Tiki Bar! PK Ripper and Dirty D. will be holding it down all summer long with plenty of guest TBA!!! Our First night back will be JUNE 14th so make sure you’re there! as always there is no cover and the drinks are dirty cheap so come get wild mid week style with us!!! SUMMER SUMMER SUMMERTIME!!!!
Jun 02
Interview with Samo Sound Boy – Playing Mad Dawg’s on SATURDAY
Samo Sound Boy’s been one of our favorite DJs over here at the HPSU for a long time and the dude’s been getting some decent press recently. Peep this interview he just did with What’s Good With It.
WGWit: Samo Sound Boy, welcome to the eclectic world of WGWit! We do hustle bass heavy music. So tell us, how did the name “Samo Sound Boy” come about ?
Samo Sound Boy: No big story there really… My friends would call me Samo, but that alone sounded plain for a DJ name. I think I tried to register “dj samo” on myspace when I wanted to put some tracks up to share, but that account was already taken by a dude from Japan who made futuristic minimal-house porn soundtracks. So I thought really hard about it but couldn’t come up with anything good… a while later I ate at this indian buffet in yonkers, NY with a couple friends. I wound up eating this one dish that I thought was saag paneer at the time… but was probably something else in retrospect. Whatever it was, it gave me the most insane fever that night, a temperature of 108, just crazy… I was getting the shakes and sweats like mad, but then just passed out and started having this dream where I was talking to a raccoon who was wearing a golden vest. There was this strange beat playing from somewhere and he kept repeating “let me bang, let me bang” in the voice from the dj deeon record. Then he looked at me right in the eye and said “samo sound boy”. I woke up sometime the next day and registered that name on myspace.
WGWit: Are you from LA ?
Samo Sound Boy: I was born in Manhattan and grew up there, and then lived in New Hampshire. Since then i’ve lived in Florida, Buenos Aires, Seattle, and then Los Angeles. Far and away, this is my favorite place and I love living in LA.
WGWit: When did you sign with Trouble & Bass ? When can we expect your next release ?
Samo Sound Boy: I signed with Trouble and Bass early this year. They brought me to play with them in Washington DC last summer when I went out to New York to play at Ghetto Gothik. They had been supporting some of my early tracks a lot, which was big for me because I was really grinding to get my stuff out there. After that show in DC they asked me to do a Heavy Bass Champions release, which I did, and then we decided to just keep going. My next release is coming out on T&B this summer. It’s an ep with some big remixes of the lead track which is called “Shuffle Code”. Nobody has really heard it yet, but we’ve got some special things in store leading up to release, including a really fucking crazy and bugged out music video staring a smoked-out octopus who drives around LA in a drop-top caddy. The whole thing is like a twisted up take on John Carpenter’s Escape From La mashed up with the world created through the cover art from Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle .
WGWit: Here at WGWit, we are “trouble makers” [T&B fans per-say], we’ve blogged and supported past work from: AC Slater, Drop the Lime, Udachi (party like us) ect. but we are currently following Zombies For Money like crazy! Can we expect any collaboration with Zombies For Money & Samo Sound Boy ? or are we thinking too outside the box ? The heavy tropical sound is off the hook!Samo Sound Boy: That’s what’s up! Those guys are my homies and I love to hear that. Honestly, I hadn’t ever thought about a collab before, but it’s a cool idea for sure. For me it’s easier to collab with somebody if we’re in the same room, but who knows maybe that’ll happen someday soon.
WGWit: Do you ever plan to produce any moombahton ?
Samo Sound Boy: the short answer is no. I think there’s some really cool elements in some of the moombahton stuff, and I love Dave Nada’s story of how he came up with idea for it, but the idea of producing under the umbrella of any one genre just isn’t for me. It’s too restraining. I take a lot of influence from different styles and productions, but im just trying to do my own thing really. That’s how I keep things fresh and interesting for myself, by just trying to make up the sounds I really want hear and not really caring about trends within genres.
Read more/listen to some remixes after the jump!
WGWit: You remixed Chicken Lover from Bassnova, we heard a lot of bmore & house influence(s) in this track. What kind of sound can we expect from your future releases ?
Samo Sound Boy: Yeah that track definitely had those influences, and my new stuff does too. Bmore in particular was really influential on me from the beginning. It didn’t have any of what I considered the corniness of dance music at the time. just that raw, stripped down sound. it was the best! the new single has some of that but also some tribal/cumbia elements and maybe more ghetto house.
WGWit: Which producer(s) do you currently follow the most at the moment ? (We know this question sucks but thats a part of an interview haha)
Samo Sound Boy: Not at all! thats a great question! The producers that I really follow these days are the ones I most closely identify with. People like LOL Boys, Dubbel Dutch, Jim-E Stack, Ceeda. Those guys to me are all the most forward and interesting producers right now and luckily friends of mine too.
WGWit: You just played Check Yo Pony Tail [iheartcomix & media contender] with Drop The Lime & CLASSIX. Do you have any shows coming up in LA ?
Samo Sound Boy: I’ll be playing again in LA further into summer, but I’m about to go up to canada, and then all over the east coast, and then Texas and some of the south west later in july.
WGWit: What can we expect on a live set from Samo Sound Boy ?
Samo Sound Boy: You can expect a lot of really new material from myself and the producers I listed before, as well as some older club music, crunk, and ghetto house. My sets are basically expansions of the influences I put into my individual productions, like a trip through all the sounds I really love
WGWit: Samo Sound Boy, as an LA based music blog we are still held accountable to reach out to the WORLD. What advice &/or words of wisdom can you give the upcoming generation of producers & DJs ?Samo Sound Boy: Hold out for the right opportunities and don’t compromise. Instead of djing stuff you don’t like at places you think are corny, move to LA, get a shitty part-time teaching job, and spend the rest of your time in the studio making stuff you can really stand behind. Then send it to everybody you respect and wait for something to come back to you. Repeat all that however many times it takes.
Last show we had at Mad Dawg’s was a certified rager. You’d be nuts to be anywhere else on Saturday.
May 31
Free Magic – In The Mix
Free Magic’s an up and comer out of Brooklyn who’s been making a name for himself playing regularly at Santos Party House. Take a peek.
May 26
B.O.M.B.fest is THIS WEEKEND
That’s right, Two days from now. If you haven’t already picked up your tickets you should GET GOING, the show’s going to be nuts. Over at the Courant, The HPSU’s favorite music critic Eric Danton just dropped a writeup of his top picks for B.O.M.B.fest. Go check it out.
Saturday
Midi and the Modern Dance — One of Connecticut’s most promising acts, this Westport collective makes lush, dreamy pop music intercut with jarring, noisy breaks full of jagged guitar. The band released a very good album, “Make It Easy on Yourself,” last summer. 11:40 a.m. to 12:10 p.m. on the B.O.M.B. Pavilion Stage.
Titus Andronicus — Yeah, these New Jersey rockers are here a lot — including a gig June 4 opening for Okkervil River in New Haven — but their frenzied, energetic live shows are just too good to pass up. 3:05 to 3:50 p.m. on the B.O.M.B. Pavilion Stage.
Heirlooms — Hartford’s best band just keeps getting better, and the rootsy group’s 3:45 time slot is the best one all day: You can catch Heirlooms’ whole set and still see half an hour’s worth of Dan Deacon afterward. 3:45 to 4:15 p.m. on the Viva La B.O.M.B. Stage.
Best Coast — Apart from a students-only show last fall at Smith College, this California garage-pop band hasn’t played in the area. Singer Bethany Cosentino swaths her full, powerful voice in reverb while guitarist Bobb Bruno churns out surfy riffs behind her. 7:40 to 8:35 p.m. on the B.O.M.B. Pavilion Stage.
Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros — In contrast to singer Alex Ebert’s eclectic other band, the electro-pop act Ima Robot, Edward Sharpe makes rustic pop loosely based on the Bowie-esque concept of an alien who would be saving humanity if he weren’t distracted by girls. Weird? Yes, but catchy. 8:50 to 9:50 p.m. on the B.O.M.B. Pavilion Stage.
Sunday
The Files & Fires — This Danbury band performs majestic post-rock instruments full of sweeping guitar currents and deep instrumental textures. 3:10 to 3:40 p.m. on the Budweiser Stage.
River City Extension — Worth noting (via their publicist): River City Extension is the only act playing the Newport Folk Festival and the Warped mall-punk tour this summer. No wonder: the New Jersey folk-punk band has made a name for itself with relentless touring and riotous live performances in support of a pair of CDs, including last year’s “River City Extension and the Unmistakable Man.” 12:25 to 1:10 p.m. on the Budweiser Stage.
Man Man — Think experimental vaudevillean carnival music from this Philadelphia band, which just released a new album, “Life Fantastic.” 6:05 to 6:55 p.m. on the Budweiser Stage.
The New Pornographers — The Canadian power-pop act makes its first visit to Connecticut. The group has released five albums of incessantly catchy music that has progressed from a reliance on abrasive keyboards to more organic sounds. 5:10 to 6:05 p.m. on the B.O.M.B. Pavilion Stage.
Wiz Khalifa — Although Pittsburgh is hardly known for its music scene, this burgeoning rap star got a boost last year when his song “Black and Yellow” accompanied the Pittsburgh Steelers on their way to the Super Bowl. 8:50 to 9:50 p.m. on the B.O.M.B. Pavilion Stage.
May 26
HPSU Gets Charitable
A month ago we sold beads at one of our shows to help some UConn students rebuild homes in the lower 9th ward in New Orleans and to prove to everybody that we didn’t just pocket the cash our boy Pat Turek took some rad pictures. Go check them out.
May 17
B.O.M.B.fest preview: Heirlooms
Heirlooms is a 6 piece outfit out of Hartford that’s been lighting up central Connecticut and beyond for the last year. You might remember them from an HPSU show a while back at the Wadsworth with Bert Jansch where the absolutely killed it. Anyway, they’ve been getting some pretty regular coverage recently and are definitely worth checking out if you get the chance at B.O.M.B.Fest
Heirlooms from Arc Motion Pictures on Vimeo.
Also, just a reminder that there are FREE BOMBFEST TICKETS still to be won. Take a picture of yourself in any kind of HPSU tshirt with a sign that says “I’m going to B.O.M.B.fest” and throw it up on our facebook page. You like free stuff, right?