G4SOM4T!!! HyPerAktiv - HPA !!! Cazh Rayn !!! Mr. Jös !!! M.C. CONFUZ !!!DATZ COLD!!!PHILOSOPHY MAJOR!!! Dr. HiTzZ !!! G4SOM4T !!! 1UP !!! BLACKSHEPHERDOG !!! h3RoFon (THE ROTTN) !!! Trencer Spacey !!! RED EYED CROOK (REC) !!! Dr.aNuS !!! ADS44 !!! mR. MakK !!! FabaONE !!! BERLIN UNTERGRUND----------------------------
LOVECRAFT TECHNOLOGIES- Where everyone is a star.
"Supernaturally Yours"
----Lovecraft Technologies' Alchemically Altered Musick-
by Dave Segal
-Lovecraft Technologies featuring DJ Prince Charming and BurningHearts Gogo Girls
(Rendezvous Jewel Box Theater), Sat July 5, midnight, $4 (free if you attend one of the BurningHearts' earlier shows). ----------"Supernaturally Yours"-
On a dead Sunday night at a tatty Chinese restaurant/bar in the ID, Lovecraft Technologies rappers Prince Charming and Confuz spit inspired freestyles over karaoke versions of Young MC's "Bust a Move" and Sir Mix-A-Lot's "Baby Got Back" to a single-digit crowd as if it were a Key Arena concert audience. The doomed lobsters in the restaurant's fish tank leap out of their prison and scatter throughout the joint in appreciation.
The scene typifies Lovecraft Technologies' "anywhere, anytime" urge to entertain unsuspecting crowds with lyrics that ricochet between high- and lowbrow, surreal and scientific, sexual and downright psychotic. Too weird and amorphous to fit snugly into any music-scene niche, Lovecraft thrive when they crash house parties, karaoke bars, and random events around town, harvesting sonic confusion and verbal absurdity wherever they bring their boombox and go-go dancers. That they're all way more sexy and intelligent than most Seattle musicians makes their obscurity and inability to land choice gigs even more baffling.
To begin to understand Lovecraft Technologies' myriad perverse facets and outsized personalities, check out their stunning website, www.lovecraft-technologies.com(no longer available), as some of the site's outlandish content may even be true. Ultimately, it doesn't matter. Through rococo flights of imaginative fancy, Lovecraft have forged a mystique just as fascinating as the Wu-Tang Clan's. Charming says that like the legendary Staten Island posse, "everybody [in Lovecraft] is a star or should be a star on their own. We're all frontpeople. But we feel by working together we can make better music." Because Charming says this wearing a red turban and Warhol-white hair, he is believable.
Lovecraft's core consists of three multi-instrumentalists: Charming (Joshua Darlington, also a talented filmmaker), Confuz (weird-bearded, eyepatch-wearing goth MC Curtis Shocker), and Philosophy Major (the son of an ex-priest and an ex-nun). Other members include Kalena First-Rider (MC Fetish, the black female Eminem), Jeremy Moss (MC Ninth Circle of Hell, owner of the Zero BPM record label), and exotic dancer Bianca Bandicoot (AKA Bianca Mendoza). "We're trying to get the most talented people we know to build on the strengths of everybody and create some next-level shit," Charming states. "We call Philosophy Major 'the Professor' because he goes out of his way to study the most out-there literature. Confuz has sick MC skills. He can rap in Spanish and plays amazing drums and guitar."
"He plays the drums with his teeth," Philosophy Major notes, "which is rare."
Lovecraft's roots go back to mid-'80s Detroit, where Charming and Major tore through music genres like whirling dervishes. Their paths eventually diverged; Charming globetrotted with a vengeance, picking up skills from master musicians in India, Morocco, Tanzania, and L.A. and attending NYU's Tisch film school, while Major studied improv with jazz sax/flute legend Yusef Lateef. The duo reunited for 1998's Fantastic Voyage (on the much-respected Wordsound label); the disc's an unsettlingly trippy ionization of dub, ambience, and acid-fueled ramblings. Besides working on Lovecraft's severely twisted gothic hiphop/illbient/exotica, Philosophy Major will drop an album of potent postmodern dub via Wordsound this fall, titled Hypnerotomachia.
"My shit ultimately is about alchemy," Major declares. "I'm turning lead into gold. I try to take people to a different planet with my music."
Many auxiliary Lovecraft members seem to dwell on this different planet. The ensemble has welcomed many bizarre characters into its fold--some, like Confuz, become key players; others end up stalking the crew and sleeping on their porches, raving out of their schizophrenic minds.
"The real criterion for getting into Lovecraft is creativity," Major says. "Unfor- tunately, that often blends into madness. So we find ourselves in mixed company. It's sort of worth it in the end, but there are some frightening moments. We're into people exploring all aspects of themselves, but some people are skipping out of orbit."
What makes Lovecraft unique, believes Charming, is that they "have all these out-there influences, but we really do try for pop."
"Fun is walking on the edge of what is acceptable and what is not," Major theorizes. "We're going to take the world by storm--no, by tropical sunbeam." I believe him because he's drunk on Steel Reserve malt liquor as he says this.
editor@thestranger.com
Influences
PrinceCharming | Thursday, September 25, 2003
MC CONFUZ is one of the 2 or 3 best MCs
in Seattle; his stage presence, latin
style flows lyric shine, the dude can
*REALLY* sing like American Idol, and he
salsa dances around the stage like a
demonically posessed Ricky Martin.
-Plus- he's a sick middle eastern hand
drummer, and plays classical gtr mixed
with street styles he picked up on the
streets of PERU. He's already a local
celebrity on the streets of Seattle.
But we cant keep a secret this big.
on a personal level, CONFUZ can have
shocking sense of humor. but he backs
it up with a good heart and down to
earth attitude. he wears an eye patch
for medical reasons. but loves pirate
girls (and female MCs)
Sounds Like
Well.... It FEELS like bare-knuckle concrete push-ups with 1000 gothic ballerinas peering at you mischieviously from behind red curtains.......It sounds like crack nieghborhoods and complex mathematical equasions performed at very high speeds over and over. Our musick buzzes like an airport. It's dark and complex like a Greyhound at night;-). It is the ultimate expression of human and technology up to this point on planet earth. Created by 2 atzen an ocean away...
Free gothic layouts at funerella.com ATTENTION!!! CONFUZ AND DRECKZLOCH CREW ON VINYL!!! ONLY 100 COPIES LEFT!!! HERE'S A REVIEW FROM DEAD MAGAZINE......
Psycufski Synfonies LP (Dreckzloch44)
„Kranke Scheiße mit Gefühl“ passt
ganz gut als Beschreibung auf die
jetzt erschienene „Psycufski Synfonies“
Compilation aus dem Hause Dreckz-
loch44 Records aus Berlin. Nach einer
Reihe von CD-R Releases entschied
man sich endlich mal für eine Vinylve-
röffentlichung. Entstanden ist dabei
ein 12 Tracks umfassender Einblick in
das Netzwerk um DL44, dem, neben
den Berliner Untergrundrappern
HyPerAktiv, SchwartzeGeist oder
Cazhrayn, auch illustre Gäste (von
denen man im Normalfall wohl noch
nie gehört hat) aus den Staaten und
aus Japan angehören. Als etwas nam-
hafteren Vertreter konnte man zudem
Spectre aus dem Hause Wordsound
für einen guten Instrumentaltrack
gewinnen. Soundmässig bleibt das
Ganze, dem Labelnamen alle Ehre
machend, dreckig, roh und düster. Das
Mikrofon in die Hand nehmen und ille
Reime spitten heißt im Grunde das
Motto. Und soll sich bloß niemand
über die sich kaum verändernden
Beats, kantige Flows oder fehlende
Hooklines beschweren. „Psycufski Syn-
fonies“ ist so wie sie ist, und das ist
gut so! Erhältlich sind die 300 hand-
nummerierten Exemplare der LP
wahrscheinlich nur schwer. Für Anfra-
gen und mehr Info checkt man am
besten mal myspace/psysyns.
G.I.
Free gothic layouts at funerella.com
