Author: Jim Allen

RJD2 lived in Philly while recording his upcoming album, Dame Fortune, which is set for a March 25 release on his own Electrical Connections imprint. The sounds of that city, from hip-hop to soul, filtered through his sensibilities and ended up infiltrating the tracks. 

“Living in Philly provided a context for a lot of soul music that I had liked,” he explained. “I didn’t have any cultural context for this music that I liked—it was just music that I had stumbled across as a beat making nerd. Philly was a place where there were enough people who had the same musical vocabulary that I did, which made the music more than something I had just discovered on my own.”

The album also includes contributions from guest vocalists like Son Little and Jordan Brown. The album’s first single, “Peace of What,” which you can hear below, offers up a mighty performance from brown, and was inspired by ’90s hip-hop crew Main Source’s “Peace Is Not the Word to Play.” The other piece of good news that goes along with the album’s impending release is the fact that RJD2 will spend a good chunk of the year touring in support of the record, so you’ll get a chance to catch some of these tracks coming to life right before your very eyes and ears.

Track listing:

1. A Portal Inward
2. The Roaming Hoard
3. Peace of What (featuring Jordan Brown)
4. The Sheboygan Left
5. A New Theory
6. We Come Alive (featuring Son Little)
7. PF, Day One
8. Saboteur (featuring Phonte Coleman)
9. Your Nostalgic Heart and Lung
10. Up In The Clouds (featuring Blueprint)
11. Band of Matron Saints (featuring Josh Krajcik)
12. Portals Outward

Yes, it’s a cold, hard world, where beloved traditions fall by the wayside in the blink of an eye. But every once in a while, something happens that restores your faith in this ramshackle reality of ours. To wit, the return of the Technics 1200. You don’t have to be a DJ to dig the 1200; anyone who has enjoyed a long-term love affair with vinyl knows that it’s among the top turntables of all time. But for DJs it has always been a precise, reliable tool of the trade, something you can always count on to give you what you need when you need it. And there are precious few things you can say that about.

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The 1200 has been making friends around the globe since its debut back in 1972, but a few years back it said sayonara, leaving legions of DJs and vinyl fanatics dejected. But take heart! Panasonic has announced that they’ll be bringing back the trusty 1200 in 2016. The Grand Class Technics SL-1200G will be available toward the end of this year, but if you want to pay a bit more to get a jump on things, its limited-edition cousin, the 1200GAE (of which there will be only — you guessed it — 1200) should be here by the summer. Check out the specs below:

All New Design for Redefining the Direct Drive Turntable:
Twin-Rotor Surface-Facing Direct Drive Motor
Direct Drive Motor Controller
High Sensitive Tonearm
Brass-Top Turntable Platter
Insulator

Technics Definitive Design:
Inherited SL-1200 Series
Heavy Aluminium Top Plate

Turntable Speeds:
33 1/3 rpm, 45 rpm, 78 rpm

Variable Range Pitch:
±8%, ±16%

Dimensions & Weight:
W: 453 mm (17-27/32 inch) H: 170 mm (6-11/16 inch) D: 372 mm (14-21/32 inch)
Approx. 18 kg (39.7 lbs ) *Tentative *Height including dust cover

Terminal:
Phono Output x 1 / SIGNAL GND x 1

Recently, we told you about James Murphy‘s plan to revive LCD Soundsystem for a show at Coachella 2016. Naturally, this development put a bit of a sour taste in the mouths of the fans who went to extremes in order to be at the band’s famous farewell show at Madison Square Garden. Well, despite the fact that Murphy apparently misread his audience in a major way (or didn’t read them at all, as the case may be), he’s not an artist in an ivory tower. He’s taking LCD admirers’ dismay quite seriously, in fact, and he has posted a lengthy explanation/apology to those who were offended by his decision.

In his post, Murphy goes to great lengths to let people in on the thought process and sequence of events that led to the reforming of the band. Along the way, he also lets it be known that there’s a new LCD album in the works, and from the sound of it, a full-on tour, not just a one-off appearance in Indio. However you may feel about the whole issue, it seems pretty obvious that the guy feels bad about stepping on people’s ideals, and if you’re really a fan, surely you can’t be too upset at the prospect of another album from the band, right?