Roc Marciano
Mt. Marci Instrumentals

Famed DJ and producer Preservation is a long-time collaborator of Yasiin Bey (fka Mos Def), one half of Dr. Yen Lo with Brooklyn emcee Ka, and has crafted tracks for RZA, GZA, MF DOOM, Raekwon, Aesop Rock, KRS-One, Jean Grae, and many more. Now, Preservation is back with "Eastern Medicine, Western Illness", a new album produced during Preservation's time living in Hong Kong. The project features an arsenal of top-tier lyricists, including Ka, Mach-Hommy, Your Old Droog, Roc Marciano, Quelle Chris, Billy Woods, Nickelus F, Tree, Grande Marshall, A.G., and Hong Kong’s own Young Queenz. “There was a purity to the approach,” explains Preservation. “I wanted every track to be sourced only from Chinese records, which was an exciting challenge.” The result is an album showcasing some of the best hip-hop talent from the West over sounds from the East, blending cultures and styles to create a potent musical elixir.

Your new favorite record is a parallel-universe rose-colored portrait of COVID-free summer. Instead of stay-at-home, you hung with Blimes and Gab in LA, attended house and pool parties, crammed too many of the crew in the Lyft, got high at the after-party, and ate tacos until dawn. Between the tracks are amusing short skits describing their experiences with the weirdos of LA. Two years in the making, Talk About It delivers on all the hype and promise of their viral single “Come Correct,” a YouTube sensation that blew up the Internet in 2018. (Included here as a bonus track on side D!) Features on the album include Method Man, Jay Park, Bahamadia, and Iamsu! Billboard says “Blimes and Gab drip with pure swagger: Seducing the listener with entrancing melodies and hot-and-heavy lyrics,” while Variety describes “Feelin’ It" as "the perfect summer song.” This record will leave you joyfully nostalgic for that amazing summer that never was. This deluxe double LP on yellow and black vinyl includes liner notes by Miss Casey Carter. Only 500 individually numbered copies have been pressed.

Innercity Griots, the second album from Freestyle Fellowship, is perhaps the essential West Coast left-field rap album of the early ’90s. Released in 1993 on 4th & Broadway, it’s a towering, progressive hip-hop masterpiece that expanded rap’s boundaries through lyrical elevation and production innovation. Their talent was ahead of everybody else by light years. This is pure b-boy jazz.Freestyle Fellowship were some of the earliest technically dazzling rappers to come out of California. Mikah 9, P.E.A.C.E., Aceyalone and Self Jupiter – along with DJ Kiilu – forged their famed lyrical dexterity in the ultra-competitive crucible of the Good Life Cafe. Founded in Leimert Park, South Central LA in December 1989, this earthy health-food store and cafe was where the city’s finest microphone fiends would gather to showcase their freestyle skills at the Thursday night open-mic.Forcing MCs to raise the bar and stay fresh every week (a challenge made even tougher by the strict “no cussing” policy) the Good Life became an incubator for groups like the Pharcyde and Jurassic 5 and their events attracted big-names like Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg, Ice-T, Pharrell, and John Singleton. To Self Jupiter, the Good Life was “college – you had to come with something peculiar, left-field each week”. It served as a predecessor to the Project Blowed scene, and inspired influential club nights like Low End Theory.The Fellowship’s “chopping” double-time raps were an evolutionary step for lyricism. A style that sounds freestyled: abstract hip hop before it existed. “We do double-time passages and runs and riffs” Mykah 9 told the LA Times in a 1993 article, “we improvise and play off of each other’s words and sounds-like jazz musicians do. What we are is liberators, liberating rap from its R&B/funk structures – that 4/4 [time] prison”. All 4 members were very different but they all had a unique jazz-scat style that was fresh. Their flamboyant chopping technique seemed like they were trying to rap at the speed of thought and it influenced everyone from Snoop to Ras Kass to Xzibit to Kendrick Lamar.In West African tradition a griot is a repository of vital history, sharing stories and wisdom with each generation by setting words to music. Over the past three decades, Innercity Griots has been ushered from rapper to rapper and from fan to fan as a rite of passage. As both oral history and foundational rap music, it will, indeed, outlast us all. Aceyalone was right.