Slum Village
Fantastic Volume II

OTS, short for On The Spot, was a monthly installment at the local underground event Backbeat LA. Every first Wednesday we gathered friends in the LA community to showcase experimental improvisation. It was a place where artists were encouraged to play a set perpendicular to their usual performance material.Improvisation was the magnetic pull of the show.The Lionmilk house band was sometimes a trio, a duet, or a quintet. In this occasion, the Lionmilk Quartet was formed with homegrown Los Angeles musicians and dear friends Diego Gaeta, Caleb buchanan and Will Logan. True Homies are able to create without fear, trust in each other’s fonk you know? We let that trust speak for itself.That day, everything was “slightly” behind and late, in great LA fashion. The handful of people that showed up on time didn’t really mind either, they came and hung out with us while we were setting up. I took my time to setup the speakers, chairs, dj booth, gear…I even went to grab Vietnamese noodles for Caleb and Diego. When I came back with the food, Pax was starting the night, strumming his guitar and singing his song…Moki

El Michels Affair follows up the massive success of their full length Yeti Season with The Abominable EP. A collection of unreleased tracks, alternate takes, and instrumentals from the Yeti Season recording sessions.EMA’s blending their signature cinematic soul sound with influences from Turkish Funk and the grittiest of Bollywood soundtracks yielded an instant classic The Fader calls “a carnival of dusty funk and soul”.The EP starts off with the unreleased gem “Messy Grass” whose synth intro, peppered with distant yeti cries, gives way to a tremendous backing track that Tamer Pinarbasi’s Qanun dances over. On “Cham Cham” EMA invites Piya Malik to the microphone again to share her styled storytelling vocals over the instrumental track from Yeti Season’s “Perfect Harmony”. Where some of the tunes on the EP have vocals added, some of them have them removed letting the band take center stage; “Poison Song”, “Uncut Gem”, “Smoked”, and “Progress” are all instrumental here giving them a wholly different energy than the vocal versions.The EP is being released with two different covers, each one has two paintings from different Ghanaian mobile cinema artists commissioned through Chicago’s Deadly Prey Gallery and are interpretations of the original album artwork. One version is paintings by Stoger and Heavy J, who also contributed cover paintings to the Return To The 37th Chamber album. The other version of the cover is two paintings by Teshie and Farkira.

"We drew a map of the road trip together. A green line from Bambi across the Danube to the Carpathians. A fairy tale animated in technicolour, unfolding in slow motion. All protagonists hovered slightly off the ground. The soundtrack of Transcarpathia and a whirling unresolved hum. A disembodied camera flies thru a bartak forest; it sinks down on a nest of wild mugwort..."