Kelela - Hallucinogen
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dontdiedontkillanyon
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Anyone checking out Kelela and her Hallucinogen E.P.? It's following on from her Cut 4 Me mixtape from 2013 and leading up to her full length album which is being promised for next year. Hallucinogen is out on the 12th October 2015 - tracklist and tracks are below:
A Message
Gomenasai
Rewind
All the Way Down
Hallucinogen
The High
A Message:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4-9mYrbXVIRewind:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=py6PgXq0yDM Comments
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dontdiedontkillanyon wrote: »
You lied but this joint fire -
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Kelela has unveiled the art for her new album, Take Me Apart
It comes a couple weeks after the Warp artist posted a hand-written letter to her fans.
https://www.residentadvisor.net/feed/101401 -
Kelela Announces Debut Album, Shares New Song “LMK”: Listen
Take Me Apart is out this fall
Kelela has announced her debut album, Take Me Apart. It’s out October 6 via Warp Records. She’s also shared the album’s first single “LMK.” Find the song, the album’s tracklist, and the artwork below. “Despite it being a personal record, the politics of my identity informs how it sounds and how I choose to articulate my vulnerability and strength,” Kelela said in a statement. “I am a black woman, a second-generation Ethiopian-American, who grew up in the ’burbs listening to R&B, jazz and Björk. All of it comes out in one way or another.” The project follows her 2015 EP Hallucinogen and 2016’s Hallucinogen Remixes.
https://open.spotify.com/track/6XgtAeRYmbr4OfEUP3q0D3
Take Me Apart:
01 Frontline
02 Waitin
03 Take Me Apart
04 Enough
05 Jupiter
06 Better
07 LMK
08 Truth or Dare
09 S.O.S.
10 Blue Light
11 Onanon
12 Turn To Dust
13 Bluff
14 Altadena.jpg)
Watch Kelela perform “Bank Head” at Pitchfork Music Festival 2014:
https://youtu.be/J7f-4oaTDew
http://pitchfork.com/news/kelela-announces-debut-album-shares-new-song-lmk-listen/?mbid=homepage-more-latest-and-video -
Kelela – “LMK” Video
Last week, Kelela released “LMK,” the first single from her long-anticipated debut album, Take Me Apart, and today she’s shared a video to accompany it. The video was directed by Björk collaborator Andrew Thomas Huang and takes place in a shadowy club, though usually in the hallways and side pockets of it rather than the main dance floor. Here’s what Huang said about the video in a press release:
We wanted make a video that showcases the multiplicity of who Kelela is and who she has the potential to be. The video is essentially a grand unveiling featuring Kelela wearing different wigs and guises as she pushes through the club with her friends, ultimately revealing herself at the end of the video. The message of this video is empowerment: it’s for the girls, for anyone whose heart has been trampled on and deserves to go out and feel good about themselves. It’s a call to action, demanding to be taken and to be quick about it. This is the reason why we love Kelela – she’s making herself vulnerable and kicking down doors in the process.
Watch below.
https://youtu.be/ePi5BLJogyA
Take Me Apart is out 10/6 via Warp.
http://www.stereogum.com/1956551/kelela-lmk-video/video/ -
Kelela’s Philosophy of Love
The R&B innovator talks about the struggles she’s faced as a creative black woman in the music industry, as well as her ongoing search for tenderness in a harsh world.
When I sit down to talk with Kelela in July, there’s 6,000 miles between us—she’s in balmy Los Angeles, I’m in wintery Argentina—so we speak through our screens. In this case, though, breaking bread across the chasm-like gulf of physical distance by way of Skype feels fitting. Kelela’s sensuous electronic music is all about the interplay between soulfulness and technology, as her wistful, siren-like vocals float over surreally digitized soundscapes.
The singer’s forthcoming debut album, Take Me Apart, is a musical treatise on how passion sometimes gets in the way of life, with spacious tracks that illuminate the way we grow into, and around, the people we choose to love, like vines. The difficult work we have to do in leaving a relationship, or in making one work, is to disentangle ourselves and deconstruct the good and bad choices we’ve made along the way—we essentially have to take ourselves apart.
The record may be the 34-year-old’s first full-length, but it’s been a long time coming. A second-generation Ethiopian-American, Kelela was born in Washington, D.C. and raised in the suburbs of Gaithersburg, Maryland. She grew up on a diverse musical diet that included jazz icon Sarah Vaughan, Ethiopian singer Aster Aweke, and TLC. After aborted educational stints at Montgomery College and American University, where she studied sociology with interest in sustainable development in Africa, she relocated to Los Angeles in 2010.
In L.A., she flirted with jazz and prog metal before settling into a more idiosyncratic lane, teaming up with alternative club label Fade to Mind to release her startling 2013 mixtape, Cut 4 Me, which garnered co-signs from the likes of Björk and the Knowles sisters. She migrated to Warp Records for her 2015 EP follow-up, Hallucinogen, and continued to pair up with intrepid soundscapers like Arca and Clams Casino. More recently, she has popped up on albums by Gorillaz, Danny Brown, and Solange, while her winning, no-? stage persona has made her a perennial music festival favorite.
Kelela leans heavily on the “black girl pop” universe that Janet Jackson, working with producers Jam and Lewis, galvanized in the mid 1980s. Janet, in turn, paved a lane for lithe ’90s vocalists including Aaliyah and Kelis, who paired with adventurous Pro Tools wizards like Timbaland, the Neptunes, and Missy Elliott in order to redefine soulful pop as whimsical headphone psychedelia inspired as much by Jodeci’s mechanized R&B as UK trip-hop acts like Massive Attack and Portishead. It’s this weird world of breathy, compressed soprano vocals, turbulent beats, and warped synthesizers that remains Kelela’s happy place.https://youtu.be/ePi5BLJogyA
In our interview, Kelela comes across as hyper-literate, cunningly self-aware, and cerebral about what she says as much as how she says it. She writes lyrics in the same deliberate, highly considered way—Take Me Apart opener “Frontline” begins with the ultra-pragmatic sentiment: “There’s a place you hold I left behind/I’m finished/Since you took your time, you should know why I’m quitting.” Throughout the conversation, she talks about her struggle as a black woman to hold space amid the sexist and racist micro-aggressions she’s experienced. She’s keenly aware that she’s playing a rigged game in the music industry, and yet she’s trying to change the game from within.
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Pitchfork: In terms of your development as a person—as a human being—what has been going on with you over the last couple of years, as you gain fans and attention?
Kelela: I’ve been a black girl my whole life, but being a visible black girl involves stuff I didn’t even know I was signing up for, and didn’t really understand initially. Early on, when I was offered an opportunity, I would say yes because I was so excited that somebody even wanted to hit me up to do anything. But then I put myself in that space, and it didn’t feel good—there have been so many lessons around having to stick up for myself.
There is this feeling among black artists that you have to be really careful. We’re not inclined to talk about this stuff because, if we do, we put ourselves in a position where we’re not marketable, or where we can’t win.
Can you talk specifically about instances of racism and sexism that you’ve experienced in the industry?
Not without putting specific people out there. In the part of the music industry that I’m operating in, the people who have positions of power are white men. There is this feeling, like, “You want me to be black but you don’t want me to be black.”
A lot of white men in the music industry are promoting and participating in black culture in a way that is pretty careless. They want the currency of blackness but they don’t want the brunt that comes along with that.
Yet you seem like an artist who can make your own choices artistically. In what ways has your vision been limited by the control of other people?
The notion that you know what you’re doing with your own art—that whatever is innovative about your work is coming from you—is something that is more easily awarded to black men than black women artists. My experience is that none of the people in those positions of power think that I know what I’m doing.
I’m still trying to understand and figure out a way to talk about it because I’m so implicated and because the risk that I’m taking in talking to you about it is quite powerful.
The risk in terms of what?
As far as the very practical nature of being able to sustain a career. There’s a way that you need the help of others in positions of power in the music industry in order to make things fully happen and for you to get your message out to your audience, even. Those people are often the gateway.https://youtu.be/py6PgXq0yDM -
What does it mean to be putting Take Me Apart out in the wake of politically-aware records by Solange, Kendrick Lamar, and Beyoncé, when the stakes are a bit different?
The entire time I was making the album, I always felt like I was behind, like I needed to hurry up and finish because this thing needs to come out as soon as possible. But what’s happened is that those artists have made the space so much safer for me to share.
I also grappled with the fact that there’s nothing overtly addressing my experience as a black woman in the record’s lyrics. I was mad at myself for not writing about that, but I came to the conclusion that since I’m a black woman, nothing that I make could ever exist outside of that experience.
The reality is that the way that I’m expressing myself on this record is coming from a place of vulnerability that is very much in the tradition of R&B. Black vulnerability is something I could never erase or take away, and what those classic R&B records have done is basically make people stop and think and feel compassion in a way that wasn’t happening before.
Part of soul music’s great contribution to popular music is the insistence on feeling, so maybe insisting on emotionalism at this moment of widespread institutional cruelty is a political act unto itself.
That’s what I believe—that I’m being radical in a different way.
You’ve talked about being a fan of Amel Larrieux, who is one of those women who hasn’t been properly recognized for helping craft the sound of modern R&B. I hear echoes of her sound and approach to vulnerability in your work.
I used to drive a Rent-a-Car to New York from D.C. on school nights to go see her at the Blue Note. I would hold my voice recorder under the table and record the show and live. Then I would listen to the recording in the car on the way back, studying it.
There is an intersection between jazz and R&B that Amel laid out so beautifully for everybody. Her approach to making songs was all I really cared about at that time, I could sing them and feel her power in pretty overt ways. Her shows were beautiful experiences, and every person that I ever took to see her would be in tears at some point. She brings it so hard.
Faith Evans is another artist who seems to have influenced you, though she doesn’t get the shine that she should. Maybe because she doesn’t fall into the neo-soul category.
I feel like Faith has everything to do with neo-soul—some of her vocals are so ? jazz that I can’t even deal. I reference her all the time. Another person is Anita Baker, she’s like the original neo-soul artist. There’s something tender about these artists, and tenderness is something I really want to pursue, just a soft, tender place that I want to love from. It makes me cry.
I think tenderness is not valued enough in our culture right now.
Yeah. It’s not fashionable. That’s why it makes me cry. So I want to be really loud about it to all of the women who have been so tender in a world that just is not tender with them.
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What was the first song you created for Take Me Apart?
“Jupiter.” It started as just a jam with Aaron David Ross, who is half of Gatekeeper, at a hotel studio in Vancouver. There was a Jupiter synth in the studio, and we used that. Initially, the vocal was gibberish—vowels, sounds—and it stayed gibberish through the making of all of the other songs that were written for the album. I was going to keep it that way, to have a Cocteau Twins moment.
But at the last moment I sat with Romy Madley Croft [of the ? ], who heard it one time and was like, “I feel like this might be a way to say what you’re saying.” She didn’t change the phrasing or the word sounds at all, she was was just like, “Isn’t this what you’re saying?” So “Jupiter” was the first song that was born and the last song I finished, in terms of lyrics.
“Enough” was next. That was a song I wrote with Arca. He had the instrumental and then I just wrote the whole thing, pretty much. It felt so natural.
You worked with Arca on Hallucinogen too. When did you first meet him?
In August 2012, on a boat in New York. I saw him from far away, and I was thinking, Oh ? , that’s Arca. What the ? am I going to say to him? Then I went up to him and was like, “Oh my ? . You’re Arca. I’m gagging.” He was like, “I’ve been pretending like I didn’t see you for 15 minutes—I’m dying to work with you.” That is the spirit that we met up in, and we stayed in that spirit in a room for three days, not doing anything but making songs.https://youtu.be/m4-9mYrbXVI
Most of the album is about relationships. Do you think of yourself as a relationship philosopher?
[laughs] No, I have just thought about love a lot and I love the feeling of being loved. I want it to be able to happen over and over and over again without all of us feeling so worn-down and jaded. It’s so fashionable to be like, “? love,” but love is so popping. So maybe we should just stop and be like, “What is so popping about this thing that we keep saying we don’t want but then find ourselves in again and again?”
I just want to live in a world where I can tell a guy, “This is the deal: I really want this. I really want you. But it’s also not that deep.” It’s hard for men to think that a woman is capable of just wanting to get laid without being a ? . “LMK” is a song that’s essentially just like, “Just let me know—it’s not that deep either way, you know?”
“Truth or Dare” is that feeling of new romance, the flirty moment of tension before you actually make a move. Then, “S.O.S.” is basically the hot late-night text: “Hey, what’s really good?” “Blue Light” is like when you’ve told yourself you’re going to slow it on down but there’s this moment of abandon where you just say, “? it.”
In an age where relationships are formed online and on apps, people seem to treat relationships so casually, and there can be a lot of cruelty. Are you pro dating apps or are you more of a traditionalist?
I’m really into 2017. I think the internet is more layered and complex than just hating it or liking it. I find it to be more purposeful to talk about the way that it’s conducive for relationships and making connections. There are so many people who felt so alone before the internet and now they don’t ? feel alone, and that really matters to me. I’m one of those people.
I’m very clear that we need to take more time to be with each other and think about what we want to experience, and it would mean a lot if my impact was to help people slow the ? down—but also to speed through the things we just don’t need to do over and over again. To create some solace for the feelings that you think you should not be having and also create urgency for you to get out of other feelings that you simply don’t need.
There’s the relationship philosophy again.
I hope everybody signs up for my class. Read my syllabus. That’s what this album is.
http://pitchfork.com/features/interview/kelelas-philosophy-of-love/ -
Very dope artist I been messing with her for a min. Good drop
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Y'all digging the new jawn? It's a couple records on there I'm into heavy. Still gotta digest the full project
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Y'all digging the new jawn? It's a couple records on there I'm into heavy. Still gotta digest the full project
The new album is pure quality - it definitely up there as one of the best albums this year. The lack of enthusiasm for it on here though is pretty sad. -
I seriously need to finish this album. The first few songs I heard were nice. This chick sexy af too
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Watch: Kelela - Blue Light
Kelela shares visuals for a highlight from her 'Take Me Apart' album.
Published: 07/11/17
Kelela might just be 2017's breakout star. Off the heels of probably the sexiest album of the year, Take Me Apart, and currently in the middle of a North American tour, she is back to share the visual for album highlight 'Blue Light', and she continues to shine in unimaginable ways.
The track has Kelela welding her sweeping pleas to the warped sonic palette of grime, pointing the way forward to a possible future of cybernetic soul. Meanwhile, the Helmi-directed video sees her take almost alien form, mixed with Medusa for a surreal visual outing.
Check it out below.
https://youtu.be/Wjq7x2d_s1w
http://www.dummymag.com/new-music/watch-kelela-blue-light
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPBBwJ7XrkY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCZ0JajOPDk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOxqujDCbsQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6bLpEymVHw
https://youtu.be/0ZBnWO3UUh4
https://youtu.be/hKML5psaCs8
