The Witzard

"GOING INTO THE SPACE... I GIVE SO MUCH OF MY HEART... OPENING MYSELF UP TO THE WORLD... AS MY SOUL BECOMES PUBLIC DOMAIN, [WHICH IS] A BEAUTIFUL THING... BUT WITH THAT ALSO COMES [YOU KNOW] HATRED [AND SH*T]... I'VE HAD TO GROW THIS CALLUS [AROUND MYSELF] TO PROTECT MY HEART," vocalist, producer, DJ, and yoga teacher Sumach "Gonjasufi" Valentine warbled within a crackly, baren Warp Records message dubbed Callus (Introduction) , which additionally included a fragment of his as-yet-unreleased song, "Surfinfinity." For those who may be largely unfamiliar, Sumach 's biggest claim to fame would likely be working alongside Jay Z and producer Kyambo "Hip Hop" Joshu on his genre-eschewing Magna Carta... Holy Grail (which samples "Nikels and Dimes" ) and was once described by Pitchfork Senior Editor Ryan Dombal as "a scraggly, scary, smoked-out croak that creeps like the spiritual offspring of George Clinton and Leadbe...

Heralded as a greenhorn rapper-producer project that's "shaping up to be easily the best thing on Stones Throw in [recent] years," despite the fact that they only have a mere two released tracks under their belt; Nxworries (pronounced: No Worries ) have managed to hone in a unique sound that could characteristically be best described as the missing link between George Clinton 's ground-breaking Parliament-Funkadelic and N.W.A. & Snoop Dogg 's G-Funk sub-genre of 1990's West Coast Hip-Hop that Clinton himself unknowingly helped inspire. Once distilled down to its R&B -leaning Hip-Hop core, Nxworries is essentially a sparse Jaylib -indebted "2 turntables and a microphone"-style project consisting of New Jersey -bred beatsmith Knxwledge and Dr. Dre's latest protégé, LA crooner Anderson .Paak . "He was a big part of me finding a sound that I was looking for and a tone that people are more familiar with now... when I started ...

"The WOKE project started about three years ago. I, myself, and some screenwriter friends of mine started writing a script for feature film called WOKE . It was something that we developed for quite a while. Initially, it was going to star Ishmael [Butler] from Shabazz Palaces and Jeremiah Jae . We worked on it for a while, started work-shopping, but there's always the financial issue — I haven't found anyone who is going to invest in the film," Flying Lotus recently revealed during a Pitchfork-prompted phone interview upon the release of his [adult swim] single, "The Lavishments of Light Looking." Despite the fact that he has yet to acquire adequate funding to produce a WOKE film, Flying Lotus aka multi-instrumentalist Steven Ellison decided to instead focus on the musical accompaniment for said unmade film first; "We started working earlier this year on music. We did a few songs. We have a few things. We're just going to let it build...

"It's music that's gonna thrive in the club... it's not anything like what you've heard from Kendrick before. It's not like anything else that's out there right now," Hot 97 DJ Peter Rosenberg ambiguously lamented about a fragmented chunk of Kendrick Lamar 's highly anticipated, as-yet-untitled forthcoming third album. Lamar recently told Rolling Stone that he's recorded "a bunch of tracks" with illusive super-producer Dr. Dre , Pharrell, Rahki , and in-house TDE production team Digi+Phonics . While he additionally referred to the album as "aggression and emotion"-filled, lead single "i" is a light-hearted, self-affirming affair. It seems as though Kendrick Lamar even recruited bass virtuosos Thundercat to add an appended Funked up bass intro onto "i" for its recent Alexandre Moors & The Little Homies directed video treatment. "Stop! Stop! We talkin' about peace... a piece of yours...