Catch up: Baile & Sebastian, reggaeton, Unreggaeton, and more

1. A belated welcome to the new-look OTD. In case we didn't mention it before, that sweet logo is by Jef Czekaj, with whom any regular reader of this blog is already familiar via his numerous musical endeavors, most of which he chooses to pursue under one pseudonymn or another. Besides all that he's an awesome cartoonist. Even Dustin Hoffman thinks so, or so we've been told. If you ever forget where he's at, just click his signature above to check out his site.

 2. Let's pretend this item is unrelated to the one above. Mark E. Moon -- the dude who wrecked the internet with last week's all-world Neutral Milk Hotel remix -- has done it again. He was a little bummed we didn't mention him in our baile-funk rundown a few days ago, but that's only because we hadn't checked the Compound 440r blog in a whole five minutes, and in the interim those dudes had lit up, like, three yards of posts. Including a couple of distinctly non-C440r leaks -- like the first single off the MSTRKRFT album, which, goes without saying, we're totally stoked on. Plus the Big Digits dudes took a videoblog ride with that dude Raji that Miliard wrote about a while back. To get back on track, though, Mark E. Moon has posted two more songs from his upcoming Last Nail in the Coffin mixtape: a reggaeton remix of Unrest and (the source of his protest to OTD) a baile-funk remix of Belle & Sebastian. Fuck's sake, why isn't this kid famous already?

LISTEN: Mark E. Moon, "Legal Man (Baile & Sebastian Remix)" (mp3)
LISTEN: Mark E. Moon, "Isabel (Reggaeton, Eventually Remix)" (mp3)

3. Deserving of its own post: Wayne "& Wax" Marshall's definitive two-page Reggaeton essay in the Phoenix this week (actually even longer online). We were super, super inspired by reading Wayne's now-famous blog post "We Use So Many Snares," which subsequently became the inspiration for a couple of MSM reviews, including a widely-read one in the Times by a former Phoenix hip-hop critic . Wayne didn't really get as much credit as he probably deserved for steering the critical discussion about reggaeton, and OTD thought it was really important to get him into ink-and-newsprint to set the record straight. In any case, we feel this is an important and definitive piece of criticism, and it's one of the things we're proudest to have published. Even better, Wayne has put together a 40-minute annotated soundtrack for the piece that's downloadable for free over at this place, tracking many of the musical moments he elaborates on in his piece. We got giddy listening to it and reading along with it: this is what music criticism should be like. Period.

LISTEN: Wayne&Wax, "Dem Bow Mix" (mp3)

3. Apparently everyone else had this already, but now we got this thing where you can see what Google searches people did to end up at OTD? And then you're supposed to post about it when you get a funny one? OK, best one so far, just the other day: someone landed here by searching for "Jordyn Bonds nipple." Dream on, duder.  

4. The Chop Chop's Catherine Cavanaugh checked in the other day -- hi, Catherine! -- to clarify that we were not crazy, they really did have an mp3 up, they just took it down to save on bandwidth. "And plus," she writes, "I'm fascinated with myspace....which is lame, I agree." Not at all. We love social networking as much as the next hopeless web addict, we just can't take myspace with us on the train. So consider yr iPod satiated: here's the track . . .

LISTEN: Chop Chop, "Mixtape" (mp3)