Ed Scissor Lamplighter
Tell Them It's Winter

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.

‘Acrylic Snail’ is the fifth album from Dirty Dike. Following a three-year hiatus since his last solo outing ‘Sucking On Prawns In The Moonlight’ and after a ream of production work for the likes of Rag ’n’ Bone Man (‘Put That Soul On Me’), Ocean Wisdom (‘Chaos 93’) and Lee Scott (‘Butter Fly’) during that time, Dike is back with a brand new 14-track album; his most personal release to date and a body of work that shines a full-beam-floodlight on his formative years, but moreover, the dreamlike transition between then and now.Firmly anchored in a chapter of the UK underground before everything went to shit, situated a couple behind this current grizzly chapter, the songs bounce off the walls of abandoned industrial estates and whoosh by at breakneck speeds like trains through tunnels. The album embodies the freezing cold concrete pours, twilight toe slaps and irregularly shaped ballast banks of the network. In short, ‘Acrylic Snail’ pays homage to the things Dike saw in the very farthest reaches of night that made him who he is today.Featuring a roster of guests vocalists (Rag ’n’ Bone Man, Jam Baxter, Lee Scott, Dabbla, Leaf Dog, Eva Lazarus, J Man, Ronnie Bosh, Inja, Killa P, Foreign Beggars) and production from a team of music makers (including Dike himself) ‘Acrylic Snail’ is an AAA invitation to Dirty Dike’s playground and further cements his hard-earned status as one of UKHH's greatest torchbearers.

"2/22/17 was the day that everything changed for me. Been to different states and weathered every storm in my path which has led up to this very moment in space and time. I feel blessed to be able to write this for you and share this piece of music with you. I have never been so proud or in awe of anything I have created before. This is for Los Angeles, this is for the whole West Coast, this is for the Inland Empire. For anyone reading this you have the power to be you and be the realest person you know. Follow your intuition and live by your words. Hate no man and love unconditionally. You never know when the person next to you won’t be there. I love you.DOM"