Based out of Seattle, Monster Block Party duo Blue Sky Black Death have been making alluring productions for quite some time now. Though separately, members Kingston and Young God had respected careers as producers, after signing with Mush Records in 2005 the two originally joined forces to create an instrumental album.
Young God remembers the early days of the outfit, “We weren’t really working as a unit until a year, maybe two years before that album. Kingston was doing some production for some people, but I was mostly working by myself. The Mush thing was originally going to be just an instrumental album with a few vocal tracks. Then we decided that the vocal tracks wouldn’t have gone that well with the instrumental tracks, so it was, like, why don’t we just do a double album, because that’s bold and no one really does that [on their first album]. The guy from Mush was cool with it, so we just decided to do that.” Their debut, A Heap of Broken Images, was released in 2006 to an overwhelming amount of support. During the making of the album, the two decided to change their original moniker of Torso to their current name, which is a skydiving phrase alluding to beauty and death.
Seven years after A Heap of Broken Images, BSBD have released a seriously extensive amount of work. A quick read of their discography will find six hip-hop albums with rappers Nacho Picasso, Hell Razah, Jean Grae, and Holocaust, two instrumental albums, two electronic albums in Third Party and Slow Burning Lights and three mixtapes – we haven’t even mentioned their latest offering.
Having just been released on Fake Four on October 1st, Young God and Kingston are still celebrating the release of their the five-track instrumental album Glaciers. A cumulation of a decade’s worth of hip hop and instrumentalism, the album is rich in its ambient, shoegaze and subdued rock influences. With most of the tracks going past the 10-minute mark, Glaciers allows the listener to create their own imagery and get lost within the music. We hope the duo shares some of their latest efforts when they take the stage at the 12th St Pavilion for the annual Monster Block Party in Nashville this Saturday, October 26th. Tickets are going fast, so grab your today!
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/113404232″ width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/112045821″ width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/12914469″ width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]
