From my point of view, the best part of our Ten Weeks of RSD 2010 Vinyl Giveaways is being exposed to new music and new artists that I may not have heard otherwise. Such is the case with this week’s featured artist behind our LP giveaway, Georgia Anne Muldrow. Hell, I’ve been listening to her all weekend at this point.
With aspirations to be a modern-day Quincy Jones, Muldrow is truly a renaissance musician. She is always looking to take her craft to a higher ground. She channels her unstoppable creativity into music that is commercially viable but does not lose sight of her essence as an artist who challenges the norm. She bears the enviably ability to play all her own instruments, and write and perform her own songs. Everything you hear on Kings Ballad is handcrafted and non-sample-based. She has been called a modern day Nina Simone, and fans of Chaka Khan and Betty Davies would feel at home with Kings Ballad, too.
In the midst of amazingly fruitful studio time, she cranked out several albums and compilations in 2009, on the back of recent collaborations with the mighty Mos Def (on his Ecstatic album), and Erykah Badu (on her New Amerykah album). Kings Ballad is the latest work and is all original and exclusive. On most Muldrow sings, on other she raps, sometimes both, always effortlessly. Perkins joins in on a couple of tracks, Medaphor lays down a quick rhyme, her son Nokware throws down the occasional rattle, but otherwise it’s pretty much Muldrow all the way.
Georgia Anne also appears on the limited edition 10″ EP by Bei Bei & Shawn Lee, ‘Beauty and the Beats’ which we’re including in the giveaway this week as well.
New music by Gu Zheng performer Bei Bei and Ubiquity producer Shawn Lee marries a unique blend of ancient tradition with studio trickery and spiritual jazz. This uplifting, genre-bending, soundclash recalls the afrocentric harping of Dorothy Ashby, the hypnotic style of Alice Coltrane, and the organic electronics of Four Tet and Quantic.
For this introductory, limited edition 10” EP, we include the original and instrumental versions of “Make Me Stronger,” with a vocal by Georgia Anne Muldrow who has recently produced and sang on records by Mos Def and Erykah Badu (she is also working on a solo record for Ubiquity.) Alongside these, is a storming version of the Billy Paul psychedelic soul opus “East.” And a remix by UK producer Floating Points (whose “Love Me Like This”, “Vacuum Boogie”, and “Radiality” releases have been turning heads all year long) takes the track deep into FP vs. Wu-Tang territory.
As we cut and pasted five times last week—the rules can’t be any simpler for our RSD2010 Vinyl Giveaways. All you need to do to enter to win is to leave a comment in the comments section to that week’s giveaway letting us know why you deserve to win that week’s LP.
Be creative, funny, incisive—whatever it takes to grab our attention to deem you the winner. Most important however is to leave us a contact email address! You can be brilliant as hell, but if we can’t track ya’ down, you’re out of the running.
All winners will all be notified on Monday (3/8) upon the launch of the next RSD2010 Vinyl Giveaway!
