Monday News Mash-Up

The sheik move of the moment is creating art in clusters known as collaborations; often known by the term ‘supergroup’. Yet another fine specimen has cropped up, with Kim and Kelley Deal lending their sisterly vocals to the latest endeavor from The National‘s brotherly guitar duo, Aaron and Bryce Dessner. Titled The Long Count, the piece also features contributions from visual artist Matthew Ritchie and contributions from Shara Worden and will debut at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on October 28th, 30th, and 31st.

If you haven’t heard of Blakroc, where have you been hiding? The brainchild of Damon Dash and The Black Keys, the project finds the Ohio twosome playing with 11 of hip-hop’s biggest and brightest talents. The debut album is due November 27th -- Black Friday to shopaholics -- but you can see samples of what went down when Pat and Dan worked with the likes of RZA, Mos Def, and Raekwon in three webisodes hosted on the Blakroc website.

Continuing the theme of super groupings, The Dead Weather just released a new video for “I Cut Like a Buffalo” from this year’s surprise rocker, Horehound. The song will be released as a 7″ single at the end of October via Jack White‘s own Third Man.

Daniel Lopatin, also known as Oneohtrix Point Never, is having his triumphant triology of Octagon, Zones Without People, and Russian Mind packaged as a two-disc collection under the name Rifts. The set is due November 17th via No Fun and will include extra tracks from out of print cassette, vinyl, and CD-R releases.

If you should find yourself the subject of a RIAA lawsuit, you’d be wise to forgo the attorney and court costs according to a recent article from Ars Technica. Using the magic of bar graphs, the article displays how much it cost notable defendants to try to fight the RIAA lunacy (as much as $90,000 for one man who went to court twice to fight charges) and how much it costs to ignore the urge to lawyer up and embroil yourself in a battle you’re likely not to win ($7500, or $750 per song).

The KEXP Blog