Noise: Archive for November, 2007

Production teams are rare in club music, much less equal partnerships, but DJ Mic Marvelous and DJ Twikks have been a tag team from the very beginning. “Me and him met up in high school,” Marvelous says in his living room in Waverly. “He was doin’ more club music, and I was doin’ more...
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The day after Thanksgiving has almost as many connotations as the day itself: making leftover turkey sandwiches, shopping, or going back to work for one more day and spending a mellow night out among whatever other stragglers haven’t left town for a long weekend. This year a good show happened on Black Friday: the...
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When we first reported a couple of weeks ago that Record and Tape Traders was bought out by Georgia’s Value Music, it wasn’t clear whether or not the sale meant stores would be closing. In fact, we got a couple of pretty resounding “no”s. Well, not more than a month later, Value Music has...
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We rolled up to the Ottobar two Mondays ago just as WZT Hearts was herding into its big, loud close and, alas, missed most everything but an echo bouncing down Howard Street. But, awesomely enough, Jeff Mewbourn (aka the Librarian) from Beatbots A/V Club was recording the whole thing. Good stuff. Hearts have a...
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In a note sent out yesterday, Fletchers‘ owners Andrea and Bryan Burkert (the latter also owns Sound Garden), announced the Fells Point club has been sold. The new owners, scheduled to take the reins on Dec. 5 are none other than Ottobar co-owner (and former City Paper promotions director) Craig Boarman and local drummer/bartender...
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Last Tuesday at the 5 Seasons was a big night for the local hip-hop journal Bmore Vibe Magazine (which the author of this review has contributed to in the past). It was a release party for both their fourth issue and their first mixtape, Watch This! Of course, mixtapes are dime a dozen in...
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We could go on all day about the song, sure. We could talk about how Blaqstarr sets up Rye Rye’s raps—no voice says “16-year-old girl” more than Rye Rye—with beats so delicate they feel like rabbit punches (or should belong on a Field cut if, you know, the Field was into breakbeats), or how...
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Earlier this year, we caught wind of a bare-bones web site for an upcoming new local venue called the Local Highrise, which was full of intriguing promises of a big room, low ticket prices ($5 or lower), 6 p.m. shows every night, and a band-friendly booking policy that assures “you will never have to...
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A great deal has been going on with local rapper Bossman in the months since City Paper‘s cover story on him earlier this year. He finally ended his long, fruitless relationship with Virgin Records and Jermaine Dupri and became a free agent, released a double CD, End of Discussion, and was tapped by HBO’s...
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| Image by Photo courtesy of the artist Earlier this week we received an e-mail—subject line: “Rediculous B’more Bootleg from Dj Donna Summer!!”—from Jason Forrest, aka DJ Donna Summer, Berlin-by-way-of-New York crunchy techno producer extraordinaire. (His Zea remixes are gold.) Attached was an MP3 file for a DJ Donna Summer cut, “Eating Crow,” and...
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“Podcast” might be the single nerdiest word in the English language. But Elements Party, the long-running local hip-hop cabal/promotion crew that runs a popular web site, has never worried about whether being a little nerdy or tech-savvy makes it look any less hip-hop. And one of the best and most recent attempts to use...
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We mentioned the inevitable “Baltimore scene” backlash a couple of months back in this space, and now it is not only starting to gather glib steam–see this one-paragraph summation of Double Dagger–but is finding roots close to home. On Nov. 6, Retriever Weekly, UMBC’s student newspaper, published a riotous assasination of the Halloween Bank...
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Theoretically, Sonar would be a great place to see two shows in one night. The building holds two separate performance areas—the massive 1,000-capacity “main room” and the smaller 350-capacity “club room”—but we’ve never seen a night in the schedule where we’ve been interested in what was going on in both. At least, that was...
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Someone still has faith in selling music the old-fashioned way. It came to City Paper‘s attention early Thursday that Baltimore’s homegrown (OK, homegrown as in Towson) chain of brick-and-mortar music retailers Record and Tape Traders has been purchased by Marietta, Ga.’s Value Music Concepts, owner of 48 record shops in 19 states. Old-school or...
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