Twankle and Glisten

Man, I've run my chosen few vinyl sharity mp3 blogs RAGGED lately. My RSS reader had begun to seem like simply an inferior place to dig for new stuff. But then something like Twankle and Glisten comes along and renews my faith in the hyperlink.

It's a southern rap blog penned by Jib Kidder, a cut-up producer that has put out a few wonderful and genre-bending examinations of hip-hop. With Twankle, he's sharing with us the very weird and raw source of his inspiration.

Have you ever stared at a No Limit-era CD cover? No, like, REALLY STARED INTO IT? And imagined a future where we'll be bidding for this shit on Ebay?

Get deep enough with these weird mix tapes (kindly encoded at 320 kpbs) and you'll see this scene is good for way more than a few alienated laughs - the crudity of the samplers, consumer model digital synths, and preset arpeggios being employed by an increasingly brutal aesthetic sense has created a heavily inventive and under-appreciated scene. Yeah, you might think I'm getting off on a cheap kind of cultural tourism, but I can't help but enjoy this stuff - it's almost avant-garde.