Special thanks to Dub Academy, Applied Pressure & Red Bull Music Academy.

This is part 1 in a series of 4.  Every Monday until the Monday of SXSW, we will post another part!

Over the past year or so, we’ve been collabing with, interviewing, jamming with, etc. some fantastic producers and musicians and we figured it’s only logical to start featuring some of their unreleased work. Mostly Every Friday, for as much of the rest of the year as we feel like it (assuming Shard or Karan haven’t been kidnapped by the arch enemies of freshness), we’ll be hosting some unreleased tracks of the best unheard and underrepresented musical talent we come across and subsequently  feature.

This week we’re proud to bring you a fantastic song by our friend and fellow ATX/Chi town beat-head Selva Oscura with a new unreleased track off of his upcoming album called Canopy Wake.

The best part? It’s right down below, digitally packaged with a binary bow on top just for you and it’s free! Grab it up now and feel cooler than everyone else around you for having something so great.

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Just right click the pretty picture and save that shit!

Selva Oscura- Canopy Wake

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 Selva Oscura (Ray Levinson-Fort)- is an electronic producer from Austin, lives in Chicago,  and makes sounds and beats. He’s got an album he’s working on and there’s a few sites you should check out if interested:

selvaoscura.bandcamp.com

soundcloud.com/selva-oscura

We’ve been doing a lot in the past year.

From covering and sponsoring (and playing in) underground shows to murals and expanding our apparel line, we’ve collaborated and worked with a lot of amazing musicians, artists, and crews and we decided it’s about damn time we started up our own event series.

Chicago’s underground experimental electronic scene is…stunted and underrepresented at best. It’s hard out in this city to bring the same crowds out to “weird” shows as some of the the clubby bro-rat bars and clubs around but we’re aiming to change that. What we’re going to be working to accomplish with THE SPECTRATONE SHOW and other JTS event series will be to provide a platform for truly talented and groundbreaking artists and musicians to demonstrate their craft and rock a show without having to pander to the lowest common denominator. Come on out and support the underground, we need all the help we can get!

Details after the poster:

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The first in a new semi-monthly experimental electronic music, art, and performance series by JOINTHESTUDIO’s new Chicago branch.

For our debut show we have the combined beat-forces of DOWN GIANT (Zainghis, Doc Ill, and b.banks of the Push Beats family) with live vocals by Alexandra Bautista, the legendary SHARKULA as guest host and MC, NORMAN. with accompanying live drums, SHARDSTYLE with guest MCs, the electronic performance opera of HAITLIN, Dr. GOOM, live modular video by brownshoesonly, and some sort of artwork by members of JTS Chicago!!

FEB 24th, 10-2
Reversible Eye Gallery, 1103 N. California (Cali and Division)
$7 “”"”Suggested”"” Donation for 18+, $5 Suggested for 21+ (there will be booze but you can also BYOB)

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DOWN GIANT
…is a 3-man collaborative effort uniting some of the fiercest underground electronic beat-talent Chicago has to offer by way of Zainghis (http://soundcloud.com/zainghis), Doc ILL (http://soundcloud.com/doc-ill), both members of the almighty Push Beats collective, and b.banks (http://soundcloud.com/bbanks). Joining them for the first Spectratone Show is the fantastic vocalist Alexandra Bautista (http://soundcloud.com/alexandrabautista)

http://soundcloud.com/down-giant

SHARKULA
…is a goddamn Chicago hip-hop legend. To say nothing of his 18 years of rhyming with a freeform, scattershot style that no one else can pull off
successfully, Sharkula’s album Martin Luther King Jr. Whopper With Cheese was voted by readers of The Chicago Reader as one of the 20 best albums of 2004 and was the subject of a documentary film titled Sharkula: Diarrhea of a Madman. Sharkula’s the guest MC for the first Spectratone show and will be dropping a set of his own, better start prepping yourself now.

http://sharkula.info/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharkula
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ot3Zru-hBtQ

SHARDSTYLE
…is a painter, designer (outdated portfolio: www.behance.net/samrolfes), turntablist, violinist, owner and co-founder of the Austin and Chicago based art and music collective Join The Studio (online mag: www.jointhestudio.com), and producer of some sort of (often distorted and glitched out) experimental electronic beat music often accompanied by frenetic skratching and yelled, modulated vocals.

www.soundcloud.com/shardstyle

NORMAN.
…is a rapidly rising force in both the Chicago hip-hop and beat scenes with his effortlessly flowing, syncopated drums and captivating melodies. For the first Spectratone Show Norman.’s gonna bring up a few of Chicago’s dopest underground MC’s so be damn sure you’re ready for that.

http://soundcloud.com/norman-3

**Featuring live modular video by “brownshoesonly”, honestly something to come for in itself, it’s pretty damn incredible***

http://www.brownshoesonly.com.php5-21.dfw1-1.websitetestlink.com/?page_id=257

SUPPORT THE UNDERGROUND!!
Please share, reblog, gossip to your friends about how studly Sharkula is and how awesome Jointhestudio must be, etc.
If we don’t pull together and support each other, Chicago’s not gonna have shit for an experimental underground scene!

   I finally got around to detailing the art and music scene of North Texas. I figured I had time with only my most serious classes so far taking up my semester.
My first venture is with Avec Souci, a Denton-based “post-hardcore” band that I caught up with at Denton Square’s J&J’s Pizza.
   After the night in the dungeon of J&J’s, (Where every song becomes an instrumental) I joined Coby, Cullen and Daneil at their apartment for some light, early-morning banter.
**Oh, and sorry about the sound issues. 

Check out more:

http://avecsouci.bandcamp.com/

Oh, and their album dropped right around the same time I interviewed them. You should check it out.
…I can’t immediately find it, though. You should probably spam them repeatedly on their Facebook page to find out where you can get it.

See you around
-adr 

Over the past year or so, we’ve been collabing with, interviewing, jamming with, etc. some fantastic producers and musicians and we figured it’s only logical to start featuring some of their unreleased work. Mostly Every Friday (or Saturday in this case), for as much of the rest of the year as we feel like it (assuming Shard or Karan aren’t busy setting up new shows or documentary logistics), we’ll be hosting some unreleased tracks of the best unheard and underrepresented musical talent we come across and subsequently  feature. 

This week we’ve got another Austin beat-bomb dropping from our man and LNS Crew member Johnny Swindles called Damascus and hey guess what? Free. Also pretty sexxxay. Free sexiness is way better than paid sexxiness, amiright?

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Just right-click! Then save!

 Johnny Swindles- Damascus

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Many of you who follow the JTS site know that we’re heavily involved in the Austin music scene. We’ve decided to take it one step further with this documentary focusing exclusively on the rapidly growing electronic music scene here in ATX.

This project has been in the works for months. We’ve shot and re-shot many Kickstarter videos, spent countless nights shooting show footage with whatever equipment we could get our hands on and we are excited to finally be able to show you what we’ve got.

The only way this will work is if we have the support of the fans as well as musicians! Together we can make this documentary a reality and spread the word about the great things happening in the city of Austin. Remember, every little bit of support counts! We only have 30 days to do this, lets make it happen!

I recently had the chance to interview the talented Jon MacNair.  An illustrator who has a style all his own. I have long been addicted to his Flickr account. Taking a peek into his world. I was glad to have the chance to pick his brain about his work.

Here is what he had to say:

Final Voyage of the Elders

Can you tell us about your background?

I was born in South Korea and grew up here in the Midwest. After high school I attended college in Baltimore where I studied illustration and lived for a number of years. I think I’ve always been a creative person. As a kid, art was always my favorite subject in school and there was never really a question whether I would pursue a creative career. These days I can be found working on different projects and freelance jobs, as well as participating in gallery exhibitions, mostly around the U.S.

Distorted Recollection of a Dream About Death

What are your favorite mediums and why?

I’ve primarily been working in pen and ink for the past 5-6 years. Prior to that I worked in an array of mediums, like cut paper, watercolor, acrylic, pastel, charcoal, graphite etc. That was mostly during the college years when I was experimenting a lot. After graduation I focused more on the pen and ink with my freelance illustration work because it easily allowed me to digitally add color in Photoshop. That was pretty important with the quick turnaround and tight deadlines. Naturally, using that medium crossed over into my personal work and just kind of stuck. So the black and white nature of my work wasn’t initially because of my love of monochromatic hues, but more because of the restrictions of the medium.

I do love black and white ink work though. You can do so many things with it (using different pen nibs, brushes and techniques – dry brush and wet-in-wet etc). I still love working with charcoal and watercolor as well. I recently painted a skateboard deck with acrylics and am thinking of doing more experimentation with paint. I’d also love to learn screen-printing.

A Pinch Of Ecstasy (a homage)

I have noticed many of your works are influenced by works of artists from Renaissance era.
Can you tell us more about this and your other influences?

Renaissance and medieval art continue to be inspirational to me. I pretty much love it all. Not just the paintings and drawings, but the tapestries, illuminated manuscripts, architecture, ornamentation and sculpture. I’m drawn to the attention to detail, often awkward and staged looking compositions, bizarre perspectives and intriguing use of symbolism. Mysticism, magic and alchemy were prevalent in those ages and I enjoy the fact that this comes through in the imagery of the time.

The Devil and His Two Acolytes

Aside from medieval and Renaissance art, there are many things that inspire me. Here’s a condensed list:

Literature: Grimm’s fairy tales, Russian folk-tales, Greek mythology, the writings of Shirley Jackson.
Books from my childhood: anything by Dr. Seuss, Maurice Sendak, Chris Van Allsburg, Gustaf Tenggren.
Film: Russian animation, German expressionist films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, work by the Brothers Quay and Jan Svankmajer, 1960′s Japanese cinema.
Art movements/genres: Symbolism, Metaphysical, Surrealism, Indian painting, ancient Greek and Roman art.
Random stuff: old maps, astrology, sea monsters, ghost stories, botanical prints, sleep paralysis, anatomical engravings, sketchbook collaborations, forests, extinct prehistoric animals.

Slice

With your work you have kind of created your own little world. With monsters, and plants, and buildings. I love that aspect of it. A glimpse into your world you created. How long have you been developing your style? And can you tell us about how you began to develop it?

I guess if I was going to be analytical about it, I could say I’ve been developing it since I was a kid. As you grow up, you’re constantly taking in influences and things that appeal to you, and storing them somewhere in your memory. I believe all these things come back into play at some point, whether you are conscious of it or not. But a more straightforward answer would be, since college. In college, working extensively in my sketchbook (which I actually didn’t enjoy at first) really helped me form new ideas that led to my current style.

Then after college, I started a “drawing-a-day” blog that pretty much forced me to keep producing work regularly. Sometimes it was good work, sometimes not. But through all that I was developing my style, and in the end it proved beneficial. I kept that momentum of one drawing per day going for a year. Towards the end of that year, I began to create works that were beginning to look more finished than what started out the blog. These eventually led to my current body of work, which became more refined and intricate. You just need to keep doing the work and the style will follow. It’s much harder to envision what you want your style to look like and then spend your time trying to get there. That’s like swimming against the current.

Ravished

Any big plans for 2012? I mean you know… before the end of the world… and creatures much like your characters crawl from the ground to kill us all??????

I actually made a little list of goals for the new year. There are some new mediums I want to test out, bigger pieces waiting to be made that are lingering in my mind, books I want to read, cities I want to visit. Also, I’d like to meet more artists this year and really try to integrate myself into an art community. The internet has been great for making contacts, but you can only do so much with that. I think real face to face interaction is still a necessity for sanity. I guess those aren’t exactly big plans, but I’m content with a bunch of smaller ones .

For more of Jon MacNair, here are some links. You know you want more.

Do it! Thanks for reading. -Kristopher Kotcher

Website
Flickr
Twitter
Facebook
Tumblr

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It has cats, neon colored bones, blue coffee, digging through trash cans, staring contests, and best of all, ART!! Full clip coming within the month of February.

Video by Karan Sethi
Monster+Story by Kris Kotcher
Music by Shardstyle

Over the past year or so, we’ve been collabing with, jamming with, sometimes bro-hugging, etc. some fantastic producers and musicians and we figured it’s only logical to start featuring some of their unreleased work. Every Friday, for as much of the rest of the year as we feel like it (assuming Shard or Karan aren’t eaten by whales or St. Even figures out how to use a modern computer), we’ll be hosting some unreleased tracks of the best unheard and underrepresented musical talent we come across and subsequently  feature (or hack into, CSI-style). 

This week is French producer vOPhoniQ, fresh off his recent JTS interview, with this JTS-exclusively-non-money-costing track Mushroom off his recent EP, Rainbow. 

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Just click the mouse button on the right on the image and save!

vOPhoniQ- Mushroom

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vOPhoniQ est un producteur et artiste français de musiques électroniques, signé par le label Dawn Records. Influencé par le psychédélisme, le glitch et la recherche de l’ataraxie, il sort gratuitement en 2009 un concept album nommé « Human&Computer », qui sera suivit de l’EP “Rainbow” en septembre 2011 et de l’EP “Nightz” en janvier 2012. Un nouvel album nommé “Cosmogonie” est annoncé pour le 21/05/2012

Mushroom – vOPhoniQ from Miyu Productions

Photo by Guillaume Grasse

Our JTS French ambassador William Thurman grabbed us up another great interview, this time with French producer (and great find) vOPhoniQ, and we’ll be hosting a Free DL of one of his previously non-free tracks here on JTS for our next Free Track Friday!

1. vOPhoniQ, could you start by presenting yourself for JOINTHESTUDIO.COM and our trans-atlantic friends?

YO! my name is vOPhoniQ, its been doing music for a couple of years, and I am now rolling with Dawn Records.

2. Here at Jointhestudio, we particularly like the sonic aesthetic of labels like brainfeeder, have you been influenced by this American glitch hip hop scene for your first EP Human&Computer (oct.2009) or did the inspiration come naturally? (I personally really enjoy the Try me 1.4)

Well, I was mostly listening to some hip hop, some soul, funk and was already doing some beats until my buddy (Everydays) introduced me to Dilla and his crazy groove. I was really into this kind of groove (which I thought was pretty extreme), I am thinking of guys like D’angelo (I used to listen a lot to Voodoo back then). So from that, I found Amp Fiddler, rediscovered The Meters, Eryrah Badu, the Coltrane Family and so on…
It really changed my way of seeing music, as something more oval than rigid, squared.
Right after that, I discovered FlyLo with LosAngeles. It was for me a huge wake up call for me of all those influences; one motherfuckin’ sweet groove, a treatment of sound, of compression, which is pretty unique in my eyes. I listened to this album ten time a day for six month, just like a little 90s kid with his gremlin tapes. Then, after that, I got a lot more into the whole LA scene, especially with Madlib and so on…

3. a. Listening to your first EP and the Rainbows EP, could you tell us what is making your sound to evolve in a more techno 4/4 way? Is it for a logical evolution of your sound or a drastic change?

It is a logical evolution, well, I am really feeling like this is what I want to do right now, so I am do it, leaving no barriers in my musical productions.
And really, my first impulse to do music, its comes from French DJs Laurent Garnier and Agoria.

3.b. Is there a major shift in your way to approach production since you last project and Cosmogonie, your first album? Generally, how did you start in terms of composition?

For my first EP, it was really instinctive, I sampled here and there stuff that would make sense for me and for the general concept of “Human & Computer”. For example, in the “Reclame” track, I used a Jimi Hendrix sample from his live at Woodstock. It represents the human side. Reclame = Advertising, comes at a moment in the album where the “Computer” side has taken onto a bigger role. It was very much like a cut and paste kind of approach, then adding on some synths…But all of that was without any strong production skills.

In between, I got to be more into it and I started to really see how EQ, reverb and other technical stuff really help the production feel and the way to approach as a whole your sound. I still use a lot of sampling, but it is not as predominant and now, I know how to kick it with my synth haha!

I don’t follow any strict rule to start a track, it can come either from a rhythmic pattern, a melody or from sampling my fridge’s noise.

4.a. Is your next LP going to be more about listening to it in your house with a cup of tea or on the contrary in the club?

I guess both, but it is going to feel great with a big sound system.

4. b. It seems that 2011 was really a key year for live shows rather than just DJ sets. Are you preparing a live set? As it become an important part in your sound aesthetic?

Personally, I have never done DJ sets. I would not do it since I don’t define myself as DJ for now.
But I am working with a drummer for my new live show

5. What do you think about Lyon (France) as a musical scene? Is it becoming a unified one or is it still only little groups just making beats? Your record label (Dawn Records) makes me think a little bit about the label Nacopajaz (from Toulouse), pushing electronica music as a whole and trying not to confine to the standard of a Parisian techno label.

I don’t know really, there are more and more DJs, DJs/Producers and labels… It’s quite inspiring; especially considering how shallow the scene was before. But it is only a start, just the acceptable minimum.

6. Besides music production, what are your other interests? Do you think you are going to stay in Lyon?

I do a little bit of video and graphic work from time to time (just like the artwork for the album “Cosmogonie”). I have a computer man! I don’t think i’ll stay in Lyon for too long. Even if the local scene gets bigger, it will stay too restrictive and boring. Having said that, I don’t think it only occurs in Lyon, even though it clearly lacks a bigger club scene.

7. What’s next? Any shows coming?

Not really, I am waiting for May, and then I’ll be on fire!

Jointhestudio would like to thank vOPhoniQ for taking time to answer our question.

All the best for your next album!