The Kickdrums are two dudes from Cleveland who make funky, piano-heavy hip hop.
In their original tracks they sing and get out the guitars, which is a little weird. Reminds me of 90s alt-rock, but a little blunted.
They are also known to fuck around with mashups, electro/rap, and all that good stuff on their mixtape with League Crew. (Example: they have a MGMT vs. Justice vs. Kanye mashup.)
Anyways, their remixes are really stellar. Check them out.
Today there are many players of unusual abilities playing Chopin -- players who seem at home in his melancholically lyrical style, who can apply rubato to a melody without breaking the pulse and attend to the music's inner voices -- but there are no Chopinists. There are no pianists whose reputations are primarily based on Chopin performance or whose playing of Chopin is consistently compelling.
[...] some of the most important recorded performances of Chopin were made by a Frenchman who was rarely flip or colorless and who made "poetic divination" a musical religion: Alfred Cortot. Cortot studied with a Chopin pupil, Emile Decombes, and recorded many Chopin pieces several times before his death in 1962. Few of his performances have been easily accessible in recent years, but a six-CD EMI set available as an import amply documents Cortot's standing as a consummate Chopinist.
The name of Sofronitsky is connected above all, and properly so, with the music of Chopin and Scriabin. For Sofronitsky's generation, nineteenth-century interpretations of Chopin had long been considered problematic. The numerous layers of sentimentality under which the salon school buried Chopin's music had been replaced by technically perfect renditions, irreproachable in their purity of sound, but clearly deficient. Something imperceptible escaped the majority of performers, even the greatest. A certain Chopin "nerve" was left untouched.
This sense of Chopin's music, inexpressible in words, and impossible to teach, was God's gift to Sofronitsky. Those who heard him in concert recall the invisible but tangible connection he established with his audience. In this bond lay the very essence of Chopin's music. Sofronitsky's loftiness of inspiration, and the exactness with which he could strike the Chopin "nerve", were qualities possessed by no other pianist-at least those whose art is accessible to us, if only in recordings.
Louis La Roche is everything good about French house. Filtered, funky, and fucking danceable, La Roche makes classy 21st century tracks for people sipping on mixed drinks to get their groove on. A little too sophisticated for your dorm-room house party, perhaps, and a little too repetitive to play on its own, La Roche none-the-less is a brilliant producer any house DJ should be very familiar with. Plus he has the my all-time favorite remix of Thriller.
