VIDEO: 'THE UNDERPASS' - A GRAVE WITH NO NAME

This video was directed by Anupa Madawela.

EXCLUSIVE BLACK ANT BEAT TAPE

With Natural Numbers (hopefully temporarily) retiring, it looks as though Black Ant has no challenger to the “Young, Innovative & Really Awesome Heavyweight Champion of the World” belt. Ant kindly laced this exclusive beat tape for us at Meal Deal this week, and despite clocking in at only 4 minutes, this is the shit that you should be bumping on your i-Tunes this week, regardless of the fact that new DOOM album dropped yesterday. As Ant says himself “teachers know me for it. students bob they heads to it. bitch niggas try to mock, and recreate, but no one appreciates. cause them niggas ain't black ant. Face of a champion”

DOWNLOAD: 'Big Meal Beat Deal Record' - Black Ant

NATURAL NUMBERS (R.I.P.)

It’s with great sadness that we report the (in our mind) premature demise of one of the most for real, innovative and downright awesome musical projects of the past 5 years, Natural Numbers.

In light of his blog post/suicide note, we realize the irony of what we’re doing here, paying tribute to his music, but, come back soon Trev, we already miss you already.

"over the past few months, i've been feeling increasingly like my popularity and interest in my music has just been a product of blogs looking for the next noise pop project -- i don't know any other way to put it than i am completely sick of the hype around this genre. just like every other underground music trend, it will be dead when music journalists migrate to the next "big thing."
i hate feeling associated with that. i hate feeling like a hype artist. the subsubgenre that i feel pigeonholed into already has annoying conventions and stereotypes (punk has once again been co-opted into a certain sound and image, not a body of ideas and actions), all of which i hate the thought of being affiliated with.
i'm not quitting music, but i am moving on to other projects. my first 3 releases were born completely out of hate, and i want to move away from that. this was fun, but at the same time, i feel like it's the right time to move forward.

RELEASES THAT HAVEN'T BEEN RELEASED YET:

they'll be posthumous. this includes my splits with old blood and fungi girls. ocean ghosts will be re-written, re-ordered, renamed, and released under a new project.
i hope none of you feel like you're being cheated out or anything, and if you do, i'm sorry, but it's the right time for me to move on.
-trevor"

SIMULACRUM OF A SIMULACRUM OF A SIMULACRUM

Remember when Bradford Cox weighed in on that quite boring leak surrounding Animal Collective's 'Merriweather Post Pavillion'? No? OK, well he did, and the board members of the Deerhunter forum took it upon themselves to follow his advice like he was some delay-pedal wielding Pied Piper and have made their own version of the forthcoming Lotus Plaza (aka guitarist Lockett Pundt from Deerhunter) album, ‘The Floodlight Collective’. Come on guys, would you jump off the edge of a cliff using a crisp packet as a parachute if Bradford Cox told you to do it?

What's even more interesting is that a track from the Lotus Plaza album, ‘Bragging Party’, was originally recorded by Kim Deal’s band The Amps, so effectively what we end up with is an internet forum nerd covering The Amps in the style of Lotus Plaza.

You can download the entire album here, or check out the weird photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy below, to be fair, it's pretty damn good.

Download: 'Bragging Party' - Spidermums

CLOUD FOREST

I literally know nothing about Cloud Forest other than the fact that I recently stumbled across their My Space page by complete accident, I think that they totally rule and they kinda remind me of the now sadly defunct Yellow Swans a little bit.

Download: 'Green Mountain Trek' - Cloud Forest

READING RAINBOW

Google informed me this morning, that there is some massively rubbish TV show called Reading Rainbow which is designed to help kids read, maybe not by coincidence, when Rob Garcia and Sarah Everton get together they call themselves Reading Rainbow and write songs called things like 'Feral Kids'. As well as being bffs with forthcoming Meal Deal artists Eternal Summers (that's an exclusive right there for you), they also write the kind of jams that bring to mind Times New Viking jamming with The Velvet Underground and Sun Ra underneath a gauze of reverb and shitloads of tape hiss and have dropped an amazing album 'Songs to Sing', a self- released CD-R album which you really should pick up from their My Space.

Download: 'Feral Kids' - Reading Rainbow

'WHAT DIDDY TOLD YOU IN '95' - TAPEDECK

This is the first thing I ever did under the name tapedeck and I just found it on my hard-drive. I think it's kind of endearing, in a hardcore band's first record kind of way.

Download: 'What Diddy Told You in '95' - tapedeck

BLACK ANT

It’s pretty much impossible to approach the concept of left-field, instrumental hip-hop without thinking of the late J Dilla, and although it’s more than likely that Black Ant owns a well-worn copy of ‘Donuts’, it’s also more than likely that Black Ant has a really bad case of weed psychosis too. This is hip-hop with one foot in the thuggish aesthetics of the Diplomats, and the other in the grainy, no-fi, soundscapes last heard coming out of the broken sampler of the newly re-christened DOOM.

Head over to Black Ant’s MySpace, now to download a whole world of shit...

VIDEO: 'NOT SO PRETTY' - ROGUES

People have so much goodwill towards bands who look cool, that sometimes they totally forgive them for not having any good songs; take The Virgins for example. Rogues however do the double whammy by looking really, really cool in a 'Generation Terrorists'-era Manics meets 'Pirates of the Caribbean' kind of way, and then have audacity to have the awesome songs to match. Their debut single 'Not So Pretty' could mark them out as this generation's answer to Duran Duran...the tunes; the looks; the girls; the drugs...the bastards.

Video directed by Anupa Madawela