Search Results for "Mark Kemp"

One of the earliest and most convincing indications that Los Angeles wasn’t going to sit out the East Coast hip-hop revolution, rapper Ice-T (Tracy Marrow) quickly proved the equal of any New York MC. On Rhyme Pays, working over energetic tracks programmed and produced by his Rhyme Syndicate cohort Afrika Islam, Ice (who had already…

Who’d have thought Salt-n-Pepa — the groundbreaking female Queens-based hip-hop group responsible for 1988’s sassy club hit “Push It” — would become one of the biggest rap acts of the ’90s? The group entered the decade taking their frank banter about male-female power struggles into the Top 20 with “Let’s Talk About Sex”; by 1995,…

Facing legal action from the American team with the same moniker, Manchester’s Dust Brothers — players/producers Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons — became the Chemical Brothers in time for the release of Exit Planet Dust, one of the strongest debut techno albums of the mid-’90s. Before crystallizing their own vision, the DJs/musicians spent much of…

This Carter Family-inspired duo began as a side project for Eleventh Dream Day drummer/vocalist Janet Beveridge Bean and childhood friend (and fellow Kentucky native) Catherine Irwin, a songwriter who’d done cover art for Dream Day albums. By the early ’90s, Freakwater had helped spark a revived interest among some of the pair’s indie-rock contemporaries in…

After forming the Krush Posse in 1987, Tokyo’s DJ Krush made a name for himself in Japan as a solo artist with a number of jazz-based hip-hop singles, soundtrack remixes and compilation tracks. In the US, his imports helped inspire Guru’s Jazzmatazz fusion; Krush and Stictly Turntablized make it clear his mix of turntable scratching…

The British music collective Transglobal Underground incorporates a variety of international sounds into its dancey, trancey electronica, focusing on the snaky melodies of traditional Arabic and Indian styles. At the group’s core are Attiah Ahlan, Natacha Atlas (a former vocalist with Jah Wobble’s Invaders of the Heart), Alex Kasiek (keyboards, guitar), Hamid Mantu (drums, programming)…

The members of this industrial-noise-college (collage) rock band met and formed in 1988 while working as DJs at KXLU, the radio station of Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Drummer Tomas Palermo, bassist Damion Romero and guitarist Todd Williams kicked off Slug’s illustrious career by staging a series of guerrilla performances in a campus quadrangle…