All posts by Adrian Spinelli

Music. Food. Sports. Chill.
Bay Area, Sports

More Violence At Bay Area Sporting Events – #StopTheHateSF

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I woke up today to sickening footage of a fan being knocked out at yesterday’s 49ers game vs. the Chiefs at Levi’s Stadium.  This time, it was a 49ers fan attacking another 49ers fan, in the bathroom, allegedly over “impatience over an open stall.” Seriously? This has got to stop and the SF Bay area fan bases have to start taking responsibility. Caution, this video of the act in question is graphic, so please don’t click if you’re sensitive to graphic violence. (Video has since been removed, due to “youtube’s shocking and disgusting content policy” but this article sums up the incident well.)

In Week 3, a 49ers fan started a bloody brawl in the stands at Arizona, last season at Candlestick, a 29-year old fan beat a 15-year old boy, breaking his nose, arm and receiving a concussion. Another fan reported being assaulted by a 49ers fan at that same game as well. And let’s not forget the infamous shooting in the Candlestick parking lot for a 2011 Raiders vs. 49ers preseason game. This shooting sparked the now commonplace “no tailgating after kick-off” policy.

And this is just the football team. A woman was beaten following a Giants vs. A’s game at AT&T Park this season. A man was fatally stabbed outside of a Dodgers vs Giants game last season. He was wearing a Dodgers jersey.   This comes on the heels of the 2012 Bryan Stow beating at Dodger Stadium in LA. Where if you don’t know, Stow is a Giants fan who was exiting a game at Dodger Stadium and an altercation ensued that saw Stow be beaten nearly to death and suffer permanent brain damage. Stow won a negligence lawsuit against the Dodgers and suspects were apprehended in the case.

Dodgers and Giants players have spoken out against fan violence, yet incidents like yesterday’s at Levi’s Stadium keep happening. This has to stop. #StopTheHateSF. This is a call to all SF Bay area sports fans and beyond to #StopTheHateSF. We need to take a stand against against these senseless acts of aggression that are happening all too often and often involving SF Bay Area fans #StoptheHateSF.

This is just a simple blog post attempting to call attention to a massive issue. But my goal is to get #StopTheHateSF to trend, in hopes of making fan violence stop in the SF Bay Area and beyond. Help educate and raise awareness.

Please share this post, tweet, facebook, talk to your friends about #StopTheHateSF.

Follow @EcsctaticBlog on Twitter and like us on FaceBook too. Let’s make a difference.

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Music

Why Kiesza’s “Hideaway” Video is Pretty Much The Greatest Thing Ever

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I remember walking up Kent St in Williamsburg a little while back and seeing a half dozen or so girls looking all 90’s and dancing in the street while being filmed. A car came and they stopped what they were doing and had a laugh.

“What’s goin on?” I asked them. “We’re filming a video!” they said excitedly.

I kinda laughed at the idea of filming a video in broad daylight, no blockades or anything and just chalked it up to some amateur-ish Williamsburg hipster stuff and went on my way.

Fast forward to less than a year and 132 million youtube views later, I realized that I had walked through the filming of Kiesza’s “Hideaway” video, in all it’s fantastic dancing wrapped around spectacularly minimal cinematography. And oh yeah, it’s one take:

I love this video. Plain and simple. It’s one of my favorite things to watch. In fact, you can consider at least a dozen of those 132 million views mine. It makes me happy whenever I watch it, the dancing is so freaking cool and it’s just wonderful.

The dancers are clad in clothes straight out of 90’s hip-hop and dance videos. The song sounds like something you’d hear on KIIS-FM in 1996 and Kiesza is so damn cute in the middle of it all. The way she eases in and out of complex dance moves from scene to scene of the video is so smooth. The video just feels like Williamsburg…that stretch of Kent St where it was filmed is so cool, because it faces Manhattan…You can even see the Empire State Building in the background. The people in the video are from different backgrounds: White, black, Asian, Latino…Keisza herself is Canadian and the cast represents unity through music.

It’s such a low-budget marvel. There’s people jogging in the background, Dudes are skating through the set…I definitely tried to see if I made it in the footage while walking up the side walk. I didn’t 🙂 Kiesza’s label, Lokal Legend has 238 twitter followers and if you click on their “website” at lokallegend.com, you’re re-directed to their modest FB page. LOL. I love it. From Kiesza’s acid washed jeans, held up by black suspenders, to how subtly she pants from all the dancing at the end of the video as she hails a cab to exit. It’s fucking great. Enjoy.

Other

AlunaGeorge Drops New Track “Supernatural”

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Welp…here is the first taste of AlunaGeorge’s post-Body Music sound. “Supernatural” has a confidently existential electro-pop beat. Seems like Aluna might’ve found what she’s looking for after deliciously playing hard to get throughout Body Music. Check it below:

Read our review of Body Music – #12 Album of 2013.

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Bay Area, Music

3 New Vids: FlyLo, Cathedrals & TVOTR

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Man…three REALLY dope videos just dropped within the last 36 hours. This post is dedicated to their overall awesomeness:

First up to bat, is the freshest pressed of the three, from Flying Lotus and King Kendrick Lamar. “Never Catch Me” is already one of the best singles of the year and FLyLo’s You’re Dead drops next Tuesday. The vid addresses death in the ghetto and a pair of youngsters arise from the dead and dance with remarkable cadence to the ever-fluctuating beat of the song. Check it:

Next up is San Francisco’s very own, Cathedrals. They just dropped their Cathedrals EP and the stunning video for “Unbound” is nothing short of an artistic accomplishment. It’s the result of a slew of SF-based artists coming together and you can read more about in my piece for The Bold Italic. Watch the video highlighted by a mesmerizing ballerina dancing in front of an equally-mesmerizing light sculpture:

Finally, we have TV on the Radio, who included Pee Wee Herman himself, Paul Reubens, as a Speed Racer-type character on their video for “Happy Idiot” off of Seeds, which drops November 18th. You’ll have to visit Funny Or Die to watch this one, cause they don’t wanna let anyone embed it [sneer].

Enjoy. Peace!

 

 

Music

DFA’s The Juan MacLean Drops New Album, In A Dream

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DFA’s The Juan Maclean is a dance music chameleon of sounds. Part DJ Harvey, part James Murphy and part…well….The Juan MacLean. The 3rd LP, In A Dream sees John MacLean teaming up with LCD Soundsystem’s Nancy Whang on another triumphant electro-dance release from DFA Records. Nancy’s vocals give rise to a club feel, but the epic nostalgia of the DFA sound is ever prominent throughout. The album opens with the Italo-disco inspired “A Place to Called Space” and takes you through a journey of house & techno incarnations that ends on the EPIC “The Sun Will Never Set On Our Love.” On the real, the 9-minute closing track sounds as familiar as it is new and addictive. Give it a spin and peep the record below. See you on the dance floor.

Other

Thom Yorke Makes Surprise New Album Available for 6 Bucks via BitTorrent Download!

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Thom Yorke is at it again. The king of unconventional music distribution has just made his new album, Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes available for download as a Bit Torrent file for the more than reasonable price of $6. I suppose we can expect something this anti-establishment from the guy who originated the “Pay What You Want” structure for Radiohead’s In Rainbows.

Buy the bundle here and you’ll not only get the album, but also a music video for the first track “Brain in a Bottle.” You can also download the “Brain in a Bottle” for free. Once you hear how awesome it is, you’re gonna wanna drop $6 for A FUCKING THOM YORKE ALBUM! YES!

I ponied up the $6 via paypal and downloaded the album in less than a minute via BitTorrent, using internet tethered from my cellphone, while chillin at a park. The revolution is here people.  Happy Friday.

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Below is a transcript of a letter from Thom and producer Nigel Gorich regarding the release. :

 

As an experiment we are using a new version of BitTorrent to distribute a new Thom Yorke record.

The new Torrent files have a pay gate to access a bundle of files..

The files can be anything, but in this case is an ‘album’.

It’s an experiment to see if the mechanics of the system are something that the general public can get its head around …

If it works well it could be an effective way of handing some control of internet commerce back to people who are creating the work.

Enabling those people who make either music, video or any other kind of digital content to sell it themselves.

Bypassing the self elected gate-keepers.

If it works anyone can do this exactly as we have done.

The torrent mechanism does not require any server uploading or hosting costs or ‘cloud’ malarkey.

It’s a self-contained embeddable shop front…

The network not only carries the traffic, it also hosts the file. The file is in the network.

Oh yes and it’s called

Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes.

Thom Yorke & Nigel Godrich

 

 

 

Music

Jams Run Free: Ryan Hemsworth, Kendrick Lamar, SBTRKT (video)

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Ok y’all…New feature here. Every Tuesday I’ll be dropping a few tracks, videos, etc…that pique the Everything Ecstatic interest. Here’s what we’ve got lined up this week:

Ryan Hemsworth feat Dawn Golden “Snow In Newark”

Canadian producer Ryan Hemsworth drops the 1st single off his second LP. Last year’s Guilt Trips was flat out awesome and on “Snow In Newark,” Hemsworth brings a chiller jam to the table with vocals from Mad Decent MC Dawn Golden. Listen:

Kendrick Lamar – “i”

Lower case i in the house! Yes, i’m a notorious abuser of lower case i’s (see what i did there?). Kendrick comes at us with a soulful groove sampling The Isley Brothers’ 1973 hit, “That Lady.” It’s definitely new terrain for Kendrick and my first reaction was “Is Kendrick going all Black Eyed Peas/Pharrell with this crazy accessible poppy shit?” I dunno….Whatever it is, i’m irresistibly drawn to it. Listen for yourself:

 SBTRKT video for “New Dorp New York” (feat. Ezra Koenig)

And now for your moment of Zen (ok, it’s my moment of Zen, but it can be yours too!) The sprinkling of material off of SBTRKT’s highly anticipated 2nd LP, Wonder Where We Land  continues (officially releases on October 7th.) We were graced with the creepy interactive video for “Look Away” last week and now we have before us, the video for the album’s tripped out first single, “New Dorp New York” with Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig. It’s an animated look at predatory creatures of the night, including the hybrid SBTRKT-cat from the album’s cover art. Watch it now:

This concludes your Jams Run Free edition #1 program.

 

Music

Run The Jewels Drop New Jam, “Oh My Darling Don’t Cry”

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The 2nd track dropped off of the upcoming Run The Jewels 2 and it has a classic El-P beat with looping effects in the background of a NASTY bass line. Switching flows from Mike to P and it feels like we’ve been here before. Not straying too far from the first RTJ equation is a wise move, cause there is NO WAY i’m tired of this sound and it’s obvious that I’m not alone on this one. Check it here:

 

 

Music

New Playlist: Indian Summer

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It is with great sadness, yet much pride, that I’ve retired the addition of songs to the infamous “Random Musings” spotify playlist. 432 songs, 35 hours and 33 minutes of music later, it’s still a go to for any party, chill out sesh, bike ride…You name it.

BUT…When one door closes, another one opens. And that door is “Indian Summer”. It’s currently sits at 15 songs at just under an hour, but will serve as this quarter’s progressive playlist for Everything Ecstatic. Peep it below, press play, subscribe to it and follow along. Also see further down for a quick breakdown of the first slew of songs on the list and discover some new artists!

Young Galaxy – “Hard To Tell” – An absolutely infectious track from the Montreal-based Young Galaxy.

Gold Panda – “Reprise” – Perfect in every way. My favorite cut off of Gold Panda’s 2013 release Half Of Where You Live (on Ghostly)

Tennis – “I’m Callin'” – The Madonna-sounding single off of Tennis’ new LP, Ritual In Repeat. (Peep my review of the album in Paste Magazine).

TV on the Radio – “Mercy” – Hoping this track ends up on TVOTR’s upcoming album.

Kelela – “Bank Head” – Part of the revolutionary female-fronted electro r&b wave.

Jungle – “Julia” – Jungle will be  on repeat at my next BBQ.

ODESZA – “Say My Name (feat. Zyra)” – My song of the summer. Get on ODESZA’s new album, In Return NOW!

Ibeyi – “River” – These French/Cuban twins are on XL Recordings. Very awesome.

Avi Buffalo – “Overwhelmed With Pride” – Saw him open for Owen Pallett last week. The new album is smooth.

Slow Magic – “Waited 4 U” – Get your dancy vibes going. Slow Magic is very mysterious….

Bear In Heaven – “If I Were To Lie” – Love their new record. killer Brooklyn band.

SBTRKT – “New Dorp, New York (feat. Ezra Koenig)” – This is a game-changing collaboration. More to come on SBTRKT, but if you’ve already been following along on EE, we’re all over this record. 

ODESZA – “It’s Only (feat. Zyra)” – ODESZA and Zyra again. Yearning to learn more about this wonderful vocalist.

The Juan MacLean – “Charlotte” – An electro throwback track, the way only a DFA artist can do it.

Flying Lotus – “Never Catch Me” – It’s laughable how amazing this collab is. Saw this track premiered live at FYF Fest and it was released to HIGH praise and rightfully so.

and get on this ODEZSA album! Seriously.

 

Music

New SBTRKT ft. A$AP Ferg, “Voices In My Head”

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SBTRKT released what will be the closing track to his upcoming LP Wonder Where We Land. On “Voices In My Head”, SBTRKT manages to harness A$SAP Ferg’s deep voice into a melancholy jazz lament. Ferg’s mind is in chaos, but his delivery manages to stay controlled.

While spiraling effects are spread throughout the track, it closes with a swirling piano and we’re left spinning with Ferg. It’s a kick ass track, hear it here: