Badulla Oblongata

Respected Los Angeles visual artist Steven Lopez features soul goddess Erykah Badu in his latest addition to the After Midnight series, a collection of portraits celebrating notable musicians. One hundred copies of the limited edition Giclée prints, signed by Badu and Lopez, will be available for sale beginning April 15 at midnight, exclusively at www.aftermidnightsoul.com.

Jay Electronica just exudes a higher form in everything he does. Sorry Ye, he really is everything you try so damn hard to be. Anyway, we already knew he could write lyrics, but now we get a sampling of his prose. Visit the somewhat tentative, but hopefully permanent, thedreamsofbirds.com. Via the always twitpleasant @fatbellybella.

But if you look at it all, we are kinda like the children of destiny, because we are a generation of people born out of a people who have stayed home for hundreds of years, never really leaving except for …? i don’t know. but what i do know is that its very odd, to walk into a smoothie king in dallas, or be hangin out next to the shea butter man on fulton street mall and run into somebody from back home.

DAMN!

don’t act like you don’t be suprised and happy to see me too ninja, you was all “whooaaaaahhh wazzyyaaaam, hahn bru?”

And ninja dont be thinking just cause i got a blog that i still wouldnt slap that airbrushed 35 hat clean off yo head while you was tryin to shake the quarter machine at the super fair. its the internet. my name is jay electronica. im on here. deal with it.

Link (via)

Erykah Badu – Honey (Dj Kno Remix)

Link (via Gear Slutz)

Talking drums and tuning forks aside, what jumps out on first listen to New Amerykah is Badu’s multifaceted vocal approach. The queen of neo-soul is still in full force, cool and clever, but on tracks like Shafiq Husayn’s “Twinkle” and “Me,” Madlib’s “My People” and “Emotions” and Badu’s own “That Hump,” she scales high walls and makes you wonder, “How the heck did they do that?” Often, her layered harmonies sound purposely time-stretched or at least pitch-altered, so wide are the intervals she hits. But put it down to the gear used and her eclectic mic technique, not Electric Lady’s Pro Tools|HD3 trickery.

“I prefer a $37 Shure SM57 mic,” Badu reveals. “I have a very nasally voice. That mic has a lot of bottom in it. I put my mouth right up on it like an MC. I sit right in the control room between the two speakers next to the engineer, and I can hear what is going on very well. I used to have candles and incense in the studio, but I don’t require that now. I am in the mood all the time in the studio. I might do a vocal take 100 times and not get it, then come back the next day at 3 a.m., and laying down on the floor, my ears will get it. Pitch is good but feeling is better. I never cut and paste or punch in, I like a single vocal take.

“When I do vocals, I am singing with a certain volume in my voice,” she adds. “I am singing the double and triple harmonies at different volumes. You don’t have to adjust it; I have already done it. We mix as we go, so by the time we put the vocals to ½-inch tape, I know it. If you touch a damn thing, I will know it.”

Badu prefers to cut her vocals in the control room with the monitor mix blasting over her head as she sings. That obviously presents leakage problems for Chav, but he has developed ways to work around her methods while also getting a usable take. Sometimes Badu would sit in an overstuffed chair about six feet behind the SL 9000 J board, alternately using a Neumann M 269, Shure SM57 or AEA R44 ribbon mic with Sony MDR-V900 headphones into a Furman headphone mixer. But she was just as likely to discard the headphones and sing right into the studio’s Adam Professional Audio S3A studio monitors.

“There’s not any feedback there when you do that, but there is a fair amount of leakage,” Chav explains. “We worked to make her vocals fit into the track, phase-wise. I asked a lot of people how to do this. They said, ‘Sit her in an equilateral triangle with the speakers, putting one of the speakers out of phase, so the leakage should cancel itself.’ But to do that, the mic has to be stationary, and she likes to hold the mic like an MC. She is at home as a live performer. What did work was to keep the monitors fairly low and turn the microphone out of phase, and we would move her around the room until she found a spot where the leakage was reasonable and where she felt comfortable and could hear herself. But just as often she would just sit in that chair behind the board in the A Room.

“Her voice has so many frequencies,” Chav continues, “from a subharmonic of her tonic to a thin raspiness, and she wants to hear all of that. And she couldn’t hear all of that in the headphones. I tried to get her a pair of $3,000 Stax phones, but the label didn’t go for that

One of the rare videos I recorded tonight at the Wu-Tang Clan show @ Hammerstein Ballroom. I made an executive decision to just enjoy the performance. Can ya blame me? It was a really dope show. The group went through some tracks that they usually don’t perform live i.e. Bring Da Ruckus, Bring The Pain, What The Blood Clot, Fish, etc. Without Rza in attendance, Method Man really took the reins as the on-stage organizer. In between his hyped up verses on joints like Protect Ya Neck and Wu-Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthing Ta F’ Wit, it seemed Meth was constantly in everyone’s ear about how much stage time was left. All in all, it was (as usual) much too short a set (about an hour) for a group that I could see perform for hours and hours on end.

As for this video, Raekwon was celebrating his birthday. But little did he know that one of the surprise guests would be singing a special tune just for him. After announcing Erykah Badu and Slick Rick were in the building, Ms. Badu began her serenade. I know it isn’t the clearest video I ever recorded but you can almost feel Rae turning red from both embarrassment and shock (but more from embarrassment).

Be sure to check out grandgoodtube for more live show footage!

No Act II just yet, but Gilles Peterson’s latest podcast features an interview and new music from Jay Electronica. Some real good sh*t here. Link (v ia)

Download Gilles Peterson Worldwide – Vol.01, No.16