Boston DJ/producer/drum machine connoisseur Joe Mansfield owns nearly 150 beat boxes but he still hasn’t landed his Holy Grail collectible: The ComputeRhythm. Joe Mansfield “You could store your beats ...
About 10 years ago, a disgruntled pianist in Los Angeles named John Wood began a popular bumper sticker campaign with the slogan, "Drum Machines Have No Soul." Not everyone was convinced, including ...
Balkan Beat Box describes its sound as "globalized urban mash-ups," with brass bands, wedding organs and a rooster's crow all finding a place in their recordings. Although the three band members were ...
It’s 3 p.m. on a foggy August day at San Francisco’s Outside Lands music festival, but inside the Heineken Dome it feels like an after-hours party. Ori Kaplan, a founding member of the contagiously ...
Hip-hop — people think of it as a genre with the attention span of an ADD-afflicted teenager sipping a bottle of Mountain Dew. In a world where last summer’s hit can be considered old school, the ...
Imagine a klezmer band where the vocalists rap in English, chant in Arabic, and sing in Spanish and Serbian. That band is Balkan Beat Box, a group led by two Israelis — Ori Kaplan (saxophone) and ...
Before you could just put a drum machine app on your phone, or fire up Garage Band, there were breakthroughs like the Roland 808 drum machine. But that’s not where it all started. In 1959 a company ...
It would be easy to attribute the resurgence of American interest in 2-tone/ska (there are thriving scenes from Boston to Los Angeles) to our propensity for tossing every musical movement from the ...