SkyBlew & Scottie Royal - A Soulful Taste of Jazz: The Royal Blew Experience

SkyBlew is an emcee from Chapel Hill who started releasing music in the late 2000s. He had a bit of a breakthrough in the mid-2010s when Mega Ran decided to release SkyBlew’s album, Race For Your Life, SkyBlew, on his own Random Beats label. Since that time, SkyBlew has been off to the races, dropping all sorts of interesting projects and collaborating with a plethora of artists. His most recent project came in 2021, when he teamed up with Navo the Maestro to drop their album, Keys of Light.

Kaidi Tatham - The Only Way

Kaidi Tatham is a producer/deejay/multi-instrumentalist from Belfast. He’s been releasing music since the ‘90s, first making his mark on the broken beat scene as part of the group Bugz in the Attic. He’s been doing the solo thing for a minute now, and he’s really hit a stride later in his career after signing with First Word Records. We last heard from him just about a year ago, when he dropped his album, Don’t Rush the Process.

Fatboi Sharif - Decay

Fatboi Sharif is an emcee from New Jersey who emerged in the mid-2010s with a distinct style and a ton of charisma. He has really hit his stride in the past couple of years, starting with the release of Gandhi Loves Children in 2021, and Preaching in Havana in 2022. Just this past January, we got an EP from Sharif and Roper Williams, Planet Unfaithful. Now he’s teamed up with producer steel tipped dove to make his debut on Backwoodz Studioz, Decay.

Psalm One & Custom Made - The Returrn of Bigg Perrm

Psalm One is an emcee originally from Chicago, but who’s been living in Minneapolis for a few years now. She’s been releasing music since the mid-2000s, and she delivered some of the best albums of both the 2010s and 2020s, including last year’s Bigg Perrm, which she made in collaboration with Chicago producer Custom Made. It turns out they weren’t quite done though, as we now get a new EP, The Returrn of Bigg Perrm.

Black Milk - Everybody Good?

Black Milk is an artist from Detroit who has been releasing music for over fifteen years, but he really started to separate himself from the rest of the pack in 2010, when he released his solo album, Album of the Year. Since that time, Black Milk has been releasing complex and rewarding projects that have established him as one of the top rapper/producers doing it today. We most recently heard from him back in February of this year, when he dropped a beat tape simply titled …….

The Difference Machine - Alien Nation and the Black Adolescent

The Difference Machine is a group from Atlanta consisting of Dr. Conspiracy and Day Tripper. They’ve been releasing music as a duo for over a decade now, with their last release, Unmasking the Spirit Fakers, coming out just last year. Now they’ve returned with one of their most personal and ambitious albums to date, Alien Nation and the Black Adolescent. If you’ve spent any time with The Difference Machine over the last decade, you know that this is a group that lives to challenge their listeners, to give you projects that really make you stop and think about everything that’s happening on their albums.

Geoff Harkness - Interview - 7-3-23

Geoff Harkness is is associate professor at Rhode Island College and author of the new book, DVS Mindz: The Twenty-Year Saga of the Greatest Rap Group to Almost Make it Outta Kansas. He recently took the time to talk with us about the book and process of documenting a band that he was very close to, but not many people knew about. Scratched Vinyl: When did you decide that this story was going to be a book?

Tony Allen & Adrian Younge - JID018

Tony Allen is a drummer who came to prominence as the backbone of Fela Kuti’s Africa 70. Since that time, he has become world renowned and regarded as one of the most talented and influential drummers of all time. Sadly, we lost him in April of 2020 at the age of 79. The good news, though, is that before he passed, he went into Linear Labs Studios in Los Angeles and laid down eight brand new tracks with Adrian Younge.

The TroubleShooters -Interview - 4-11-23

The TroubleShooters are the duo consisting of int eighty from Dual Core and Mikal kHill. They released their first full-length album this year, Production, six years after their first EP. They took the time earlier this year to sit down with us and talk about that project, their working process as a duo, and discuss who the best rapper in the No Friends collective is, among other things. Scratched Vinyl: Let’s start with some basic background.

Jake Ferguson featuring Malcolm Catto - MILS002: Emotions Run Dry

The Madlib Invazion Music Library Series was established by Madlib and Egon over the course of the pandemic, created with a desire to give their creative friends a place to have the freedom to create without any limitations or expectations. The only constraints were that it had to work as a stand-alone album, and it had to work as a one-stop, easy-to-clear source for background music in film and television. The first entry came to us from JJ Whitefield, who gave us Ethio Meditations/Drama Al Dente.