The best experimental albums of the year highlight the breadth of human expression and take listeners to heretofore unknown realms in music, pushing boundaries.
Following Robed in Rareness from last fall, Shabazz Palaces continues a provisional series with the cryptic and digressive Exotic Birds of Prey.
The best hip-hop albums celebrate classic styles with new approaches, blend rap with electronic, jazz, and soul, and push the boundaries of genre.
On Robed in Rareness, Ishmael Butler aka Shabazz Palaces takes yet another step in his forward-thinking, far-sighted project of Afrofuturistic hip-hop.
Nostalgia Alert! Jump back a decade and enjoy the best songs of 2011. They are headlined by a synthpop classic, a massive hit from a hot diva, pristine harmonies of a young band headed for greatness.
2011 was a year of great diversity, in which rap fans were faced with enough variety to find whatever flavor of hip-hop they wanted.
A sultry, locomotive shuffle of hip-hop and hot blue funk, Shabazz Palaces' "Bad Bitch Walking" features Ishmael Butler as a susurrating lover whose languid gaze of a woman is slowly supplanted by the erotic ellipses of female motion.
With the release of Shabazz Palaces’ The Don of Diamond Dreams, producer-rapper Ishmael Butler envisions yet another lunar world of sound disturbed by his anxieties and desires.
Our 20 Questions feature sums up the quality that Shabazz Palaces' Ishmael Butler only reveals once you get to talking with him: his dry, clipped humor.
Bridging disparate influences like Portishead and Das EFX in his multifarious hip-hop, Porter Ray waxes poetically about the troubles in own his life and in the world around him in this interview.
A host of artists have carved out a niche in the interplanetary margins that now rest in hip-hop culture. Some call it an expansion on Afrofuturist philosophies; others simply a long-time propensity for the science-fiction genre.
Aggressively experimental, "Since C.A.Y.A." is dissonant and schizophrenic with beats going all over the place and plenty of tasty sonic treats weaving in and out of the track.
