BANKS - Brain (Ta-ku Remix)

BANKS is never short of stunning. Since her emergence last year, she has been steadily amassing a catalog of songs that cement her as one of the best rising songstresses in the industry. Sometimes sultry, sometimes sorrowful, her tales can be alternately tender or love lorn, or even both at the same time. She has cultivated a dark aura about her, but somehow still comes across as relatable. Perhaps it is the mixed bag of emotions which she presents that feels so familiar. The intensity in her songs is palpable due in equal parts to her powerful voice and the stellar production she has garnered to accompany it.

Another breakout star from 2013, Ta-ku, was certainly a welcome presence for this remix of "Brain". The original features production from Shlohmo, a man who is no stranger to constructing swelling and haunting back beats. His linking with BANKS was almost a given. Usually, the syrupy yet forceful flow of her voice carries the track, but on "Brain" she shows less restraint and displays a little more range and volume. Ta-ku deftly highlighted these features in his remix, while also reworking Shlohmo's contributions into something of his own.

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::M∆DE::IN::HEIGHTS:: - Skylark Interabang?!

This song is an old favorite of mine, partly because of the unique artist name. When I open my media player, those colons in the name place it near the top of the list alphabetically, so it naturally gets more attention. In addition, it fits all the criteria I have for sharing: it's a cool track, there's a free download, and you probably haven't heard it before. The only hitch is that it's several years old (in fact, it was released the day before I started this blog). The song holds some meaning for me because that was a time when I was still fresh to the world of music blogs, and I was still trying to figure out what 'dubstep' was. I know now that the drops in this track don't exactly qualify as face melting, but they were and are an unexpectedly pleasing twist.

My fondness runs deeper given that ::M∆DE::IN:HEIGHTS:: is a side project of  DJ Sabzi, the production half of Blue Scholars. His beats coupled with the lovely lilting voice of Kelsey Bulkin posed another challenge to my perception of what a hip-hop producer can do.

The reason I'm dredging it up now is that I've just recently learned some interesting facts relating to "Skylark Interabang?!".

Perhaps I was too enthralled with the instrumental, but I never gave a thought as to what the title meant. A skylark is a bird (among other things) but it turns out that the rest is redundant. "Interabang" or "interrobang" is the name of the punctuation mark which signifies an excited inquiry; it's a combination question mark and exclamation point. The word literally means "?!".

Perhaps I was not enthralled enough with the instrumental, because I shamefully missed which song it samples. Skylark Interabang Interabang borrows heavily from Sufjan Stevens's "Concerning The UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois" from his acclaimed Illinois album. It's a pleasant piano line, but I posit that this sample was pulled with a plan in mind. In that particular chapter, Sufjan recounts a real incident "where several persons reported seeing a large triangular object with three lights flying at night". Suddenly, I'm drawn again to what has kept me listening to this song all these years, the strangely stylized name. The song's artwork seems to perfectly portray a reference to the sample's lyrical content and the group that so cleverly used it. How about that?!?!

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