The end of this week’s daily updates see our first ever guest editor Lushlife - aka Philadelphia’s Raj Haldar - curate for us the eleventh Transmission mixtape (and third guest contribution) AND take over writing duties for the featured artist entries until Friday, based on his picks for the Transmission mix.

Lushlife, already a huge prospect in the Philadelphia scene, will shortly release his huge debut LP Plateau Vision through Texas’ Western Vinyl label. A buoyant and unfamiliar hip hop characterised by rich production and weighty lyrics, Lushlife’s music seems to attract and repel reference points in equal measure.

Check back over the coming days for the continuation of Raj’s write-up of his Transmission selections, and listen to the mix in full above.

The Lushlife write-up pt 1 of 3:

I actively try to stay away from this trope of “indie hip-hop artist with cloyingly eclectic tastes”. But, sometimes it chases me down. I suppose, to some degree, it’s who I am. Though I grew up with a steady diet of Nas, Black Moon, and A Tribe Called Quest during that hallowed ‘90s golden era, I was raised on just as much early Rough Trade and Matador catalog-type shit. And that’s not to say that I didn’t dig deep into the radio pop of my youth, either; but that’s just outside the scope of this playlist. Here, I’ve simply assembled music that I love. From the avant-garde Japanese pop of Towa Tei (as remixed by Cornelius), to the no-less-heady, but extra-gully sounds of Harlem upstart, ASAP Rocky, also peppered with some of my own work for context; I hope that this Transmission gives some good insight into the music that is important to me, and by inheritance, to my work.

Lushlife - Catch the Breeze: For a time, I was deeply interested in English acts like Slowdive, that were doing an amazing job of wall-of-sound shoegaze that had some kind of twinkling quality. For this piece, from my ‘No More Golden Days’ mixtape (available via bandcamp) I pitched down one of my favorite Slowdive jams, and spit a sixteen over it. Being able to create something with this sort of scope, is part of the amazing post-modern beauty of rap music. Really.

Nightlands - 300 Clouds: I don’t know too much about this dude, Nightlands. He’s from Philly, too. I know he’s in some other bands, and might be signed to Secretly Canadian or something. Anyway, this song is another amazing outcropping of living in a post-Animal Collective world. The atmosphere is amazing, and the melody has been starting to take over my brain as spring arrives here in Philadelphia.

The Lushlife Transmission:

01 – Air France- June Evenings
02 – Lushlife - Meridian Sound (Part Three)
03 – Glass Candy - Rolling Down the Hills
04 – ASAP Rocky - Palace
05 – Botany - Agave
06 – Lushlife - Catch the Breeze
07 – Nightlands - 300 Clouds
08 – Thundercat - For Love I Come
09 – Wild Nothing - Chinatown
10 – ceo - Illuminata (Lushlife remix)
11 – Blonde Redhead - Penny (SALEM remix)
12 – Earl Sweathshirt - Datass
13 – Lushlife - Daylight Into Me (SSG1200 Low Bias remix)
14 – Dirty Projectors - Stillness is the Move (Hidden Cat remix)
15 – Towa Tei - Butterfly (Cornelius remix)
16 – Lushlife - Big Sur
17 – Zoo Kid - Out Getting Ribs

[guest player cover by Amanda Cerini]

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[Check out past Transmissions here]