New Altitude Sickness - "The Jamburglar"

I've gotta break the flow of the best of 2010 to draw our readers' attention away from our pretension for a hot minute, and toward something really fucking cool. A friend of these BZNZmen and accomplished electronic musician Altitude Sickness has just released his newest project The Jamburglar, eleven bumpin' tracks of tunes produced using the super cool Monome interface. What's a monome? Essentially an electronic music controller that uses light-up buttons, the monome is used and loved by artists like Daedelus and Edison. Altitude Sickness's personal 'nomes are housed in tupperware. As if it weren't cool enough that the homie is making really dope tunes by pressing light-up buttons on a fuckin' tupperware, Altitude Sickness has also released The Jamburglar with an additional interactive software component, the so-called Partially Interactive Media Player, or P.I.M.P. As the super cool website states, "The P.I.M.P. allows the user to visualize realtime meta-musical information while listening to 'The Jamburglar'." The screenshots are the illinest, even if this reviewer hasn't had a hot minute to experiment with P.I.M.P. itself (available now for Mac, Windows, and Linux).

Don't sleep on this cat Altitude Sickness though. Aside from being a tremendous beat producer, hardware technician, creator of innovative media playback interfaces, he also wrote a program called SmackTop that reverse engineers a MacBook's motion detectors for musical applications (available free and open source, of course). With all these accomplishments, I suppose now would be an ideal time to mention that he's opened for some fairly awesome acts including Nosaj Thing, Daedelus, Hudson Mohawke, Mike Slott, Lucky Dragons, Edison and makingthenoise. Phew.

The album rules. The track "A Flyer Education" is some of Altitude Sickness's finest work to date, using a well-placed Deltron 3030 sample as thematic basis for some fly beats. "Frigid Flux (Redux)" is another example of Altitude Sickness's wizardry, using some crazy silky electronic textures to get your hips movin' every time. The sample of Broken Social Scene's "Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl" on "Skip Hop" that then transitions into "Mrs. Officer" by Lil Wayne shows both Altitude Sickness's eclecticism as well as his brilliant compositional awareness. He then steers the track right into Busdriver's "The Troglodyte Wins" a collision with only the most delicious results. This guy royally knows his shit, and additionally, the experience of viewing his compositional process live is a mindfuck that hurts so good.

These aren't your grandpa's mashups. Stop reading this bullshit and download the man's work. The Jamburglar and the P.I.M.P. accompaniment are available here.