DJ Muggs is of course the legendary deejay and producer from Cypress Hill. Recently, he and Egon teamed up with California’s Broc Cellars and its winemaker Chris Brockway for Notes & Tones: Deep natural wine meets deep jazz and rap samples on vinyl. While I can’t speak to the wine, we can speak to DJ Muggs resulting instrumental album, Notes & Tones. To make this album, DJ Muggs and Egon sourced and cleared the catalog of one Sun Ra.

Cunabear is an artist originally from Richmond, Virginia, but now based in Savannah, Georgia. He’s been releasing music since the mid-2010s, and is a founder of the BearTooth Collective. In March of 2021, Cunabear teamed up with producer Steel Tipped Dove to release the album, STEEL-TIPPED BEAR’S CLAW! It went so well, they decided to run it back, now dropping their second album as a duo, Steel Tipped Bear Claws 2: Phantasmagoria.

Thorts is an emcee from Bunbury, Australia, who has been releasing music since the mid-2000s. He’s shown no signs of slowing down, either, with recent projects with Jack Vaul, Joel Simeus, Whatever Cecil, and DJ Silence. Just last November, he teamed up with Unsung for The Unsung Thorts EP. Now he’s back with a collection of unreleased material, It Could Be Worse. It Could Be Worse is a collection of songs from 2019-2023 that for whatever reason didn’t end up with a home.

Rav is an artist born in the Soviet Union but these days he calls Los Angeles home. He is also one-third of the Exociety collective, alongside Kill Bill and Scuare. He contributed to the group album, deception falls, which came out last year, but it’s been three years since his last solo project, I’m On To Me. As it turns out, Rav has been going through some challenges and setbacks during this time period, including getting his laptop stolen, which contained the majority of his new album on it.

Will Hagle is a writer originally from Champaign, Illinois, but now residing in Los Angeles. He is most well known as a staff writer at Passion of the Weiss. He has now taken the step of contributing to Bloomsbury’s 33 1⁄3 series of books with Madvillainy. Madvillainy, the 2004 release from MF DOOM and Madlib, is an album that is held in high esteem by hip hop heads, elevated by the fact that the two artists involved loved to surround themselves in mystery, myth, and multiple personas.

sleepingdogs is a new duo consisting of Providence artist Jesse the Tree and Philly artist andrew. Both are relatively new to the scene, but both have put out some pretty substantial albums in the past couple of years that have caught some ears, whether that be andrew’s Sad Dance Songs/I Don’t Know, which came out earlier this year, or Jesse the Tree’s Pigeon Man, which marked his debut on Strange Famous last year.

Sleep Sinatra is an artist from Lincoln, Nebraska who has been releasing music for about a decade now. In that time, he’s worked with people like Ohbliv, Stik Figa, and August Fanon, just to name a few. Now he has teamed up with producer The Architect to give us a new EP, Battle of the Angelz. The Architect might not be a name that you immediately recognize, but his career in the Bay Area goes back to the early ‘90s, when he was part of the group Homeliss Derelix, who put out a couple of 12” on a new label called Stones Throw.

Del Jones is a musician from Philadelphia who unfortunately has been largely lost to time. He recorded and released an album and a few singles in the early ‘70s, but he never found the support to keep his music career moving forward, and his music seemed destined to be a treasure that only those of a certain generation in Philly knew about, and his death in 2006 went largely unnoticed in the music world.

Yarni is a producer/musician from Sheffield who has been releasing music for the past five years. He had a bit of a breakthrough with his last album, 2022’s Pigna, which was inspired by a visit to Sicily. Now he’s teamed up with Oxford producer Give Me Monaco to make a new full-length album, Parenthesis. Give Me Monaco is also a fairly new artist, dropping his debut album, From the Coral to the Grey, in 2020.

Adi Oasis is a singer-songwriter/bassist born in Paris of Caribbean heritage, but now based in Brooklyn for a few years. She used to perform under the name Adeline and was part of the group Escort. She debuted the name Adi Oasis with an EP released in September of 2021. She now realizes the next major step in her career as a solo artist with her full-length album, Lotus Glow. Some artists take more direct paths, and others might be a bit more winding, but neither is a better way to go.