Left. Right. Left. Right.

New heat from 77Klash to be out soon on Trouble & Bass records (via Dutty Artz).

Just letting you know that the Crookers album “Tons of Friends” is finally out as I’m kinda busy getting the new seen. page/shop in the course of the week. Stay tuned!

Douster DJ set at BTYCL, 06-03-2010 by BTYCL muenchen

This is the lead off single from Aloe Blacc’s forth coming album Good Things, produced by Truth & Soul, and featuring the backing band known as Expressions and El Michels Affair. The A-Side “I Need A Dollar” has just debuted as the theme song to the HBO series How To Make It In America.

The 12-inch vinyl for “Dollar” will be in stores April 2010. An advance digital release is available on iTunes. Instrumentals for both tracks are included.

The album Good Things will be released in 2010 – track list & street date TBA.

via Stones Throw Records

As the weekend comes, I’d like to share three reggae-/Jamaica-related articles/blog posts which I enjoyed reading in the last couple of days:

Chow
Diplo writes about his latest visit to Kingston to play a show at Fiction, a visit during which he met Chow amongst others. Chow was the main engineer at legendary Tuff Gong studios back in the days of Bob Marley and now lives in the back of the studio. Read the whole article over at the Mad Decent blog.

Sci-Fi and Reggae
“A thinky-piece in it exploring the fraught relationship between Afrofuturist reggae musicians and the Rastas-in-Space projected by Hollywood films and sci-fi authors” taken from the latest issue of Woofah magazine. Read an appetizer over at Wayne&Wax.

Reggae’s Civil War
Baz Dreisinger about Gully versus Gaza and about why Kartel and Mavado might be the “Biggie and Tupac of Dancehall”. Read the whole story over at the Village Voice. (via Mixpak Records)

This week’s Tropical Heat podcast was put together by Joscha Hoffman (Silly Walks Disco).

Silly Walks Discotheque is the follow up project of the 1991 founded german Reggae soundsystem Silly Walks Movement and has, with founding member Oliver Schrader and MC Joscha still 2/3 of the known crew on the road, been bringing all kind of caribbean flavours to the massives.

Silly Walks have been major influentials for us loving Reggae music and Jamaica as much as we do today. Back in 1995, they were featured on German TV show “Lost in Music” talking about their boat trips from Hamburg to London to buy the latest Jamaican 45s  – at a time when we hardly knew anything about Dub, Reggae, and Dancehall.

It’s really a pleasure to still see Oliver and Joscha doing their thing today and keeping up with the latest trends in Jamaican music.

Find the tracklist for Joschua’s “Dancehall 2010” mix on the byte.fm website, check the Tropical Heat blog for the complete Tropical Heat archive, and subscribe to the Tropical Heat podcast here.

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Download Tropical Heat 02-03-2010 mixed by Joscha Hoffmann (Silly Walks Disco)