PAST BLAST MASTERY





















Clef's insanely amazing custom Kemetic hoodie by Twin at Kings Kounty. Somewhere in the wild deserts of Manhattan, January 2007.

Details for the next show are emerging ahead of next week's rehearsals with Mos Def at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Opera House. First, holler at HYPNOTIC in an opera house. Second, a PSA: it's bubbling that this show is selling quicker than any BAM show ever has (or as Halima put it, "selling out faster than a Sufjan Stevens show in the LES"...cool but what's an LES?) so you'd better buy tix NOW. Third, our crew El Michels Affair is opening up the Friday night show so it's gonna smokes and jokes all night long.

On our end it looks like we won't be reprising much (if any) of the "American Songbook" material from the Lincoln Center gig a week or so back. For HYPNOTIC that's neither here nor there...yall know we "do exactly what street brass bands are good at, making a powerful arrangement of whatever music is put in front of it" Ben Ratliff NY Times dude whyle out regardless. Still, even if the Lincoln Center thing was a bag of mixed nuts, we had fun running through the craziness of "The Grunt" by the JBs and opening up "I Put A Spell On You" by Screamin Jay Hawkins. It's weird, it probably happens all the time in art and in life but a lot of the wild energy from rehearsals didn't translate to the stage. Anyways today we got a misty-eyed and dug up some almost vintage footage of HYPNOTIC getting down the basics of the Screamin Jay joint.