Sunday, October 10, 2010
The Kitchen Has Moved!
You can catch us HERE now:
www.different-kitchen.com
Labels: Admin
Saturday, October 02, 2010
The Kitchen: Temporarily Closed For Renovations!
As those of you who follow me on twitter already know, The Kitchen is finally making the jump from this cot-awful Blogger platform to wordpress and our own custom domain! It's been a good seven-plus years but probably at least two or three years too many on this archaic platform. Seeing what you can do on wordpress, I realize how much of a bloody idiot I've been for sticking with Blogger all this time, and not even the new version of Blogger either - I had made too many tweaks and customizations on this creaky old site to want to start from scratch when Blogger upgraded their platform so never made the switch. 2005 style, baby!
Still seven years and almost 2½ million unique hits later, we've managed to catch some plaudits and props along the way even though we were looking amateur hour status as far as the site's opitcs. Mercifully, thanks to the homie, Rafi Kam at Oh Word and his generous offer, finally making hte jump to wordpress was not only easy & relatively painless but also CHEAP! The new site has been in development for the past few weeks and is pretty close to being ready to launch. There's still some tweaking of the format and porting of assets from this version of The Kitchen to the new one to do but Different Kitchen 2.0 will be officially ready to launch with a fresh but still familiar feel within the next two weeks, possibly sooner, by my estimation.
I could keep posting here in the meantime 'cos, believe me, I got more than enough stuff to post, but frankly I'm kind of tired and I have a million other projects & opportunities I need to be working on anyway on so I'm gonna wrap up things here for now and concentrate on getting the new site ready to rock. To make up for the lack of posting I'll probably be more active on twitter though.
So, to those of you who come here regularly looking for that ole' different or next sh-t, first off: thanks for the years of support but also walk with me and/or keep checking back here for an announcement of when Different Kitchen 2.0 will be ready to go. In the meantime, enjoy your weekend and see you on the other side.
Labels: Admin
Thursday, July 01, 2010
Happy Canada Day!
Custom Canada Day Chucks by Sole Brother [via Customsnkr.com]
So I'm a bit conflicted today. Its a holiday here in Canada but this was also supposed to be the launch date for a project that I have been working on with my fellow Connoisseurs of Culture, Benhameen of Pleasedontstare.com and Stone of The Couch Sessions called Independent's Day. The concept was a mixtape of collabs between independent artists (mostly) from the T.dot (Toronto) with independent artists from the DMV (DC-Maryland-VA) all produced by new and up-and-coming Toronto and DMV-based beat-makers. The goal was to launch it in conjunction with July 1, Canada Day (aka Canada's Birthday or Canadian independence day) and the US Independence day, July 4.
We've been working on it for a few months but even our best planning and efforts underestimated how long and how much of an undertaking this was really gonna be that, now that the deadline is finally upon us, we found ourselves nowhere close to being ready to release it yet.
Plans for the mixtape are still going ahead though. We are gonna push it back to later this year so that we can not only finish it but do it right meaning: getting all the artists we wanted and getting them the best beats to spit over that we can. We want to do the concept proper justice because we are putting in far too much work to settle for anything but the best possible project we can create. Besides, there's too many bullsh-t blog-sponsored mixtapes flooding the
In the meantime though, I'm gonna post videos and music from some of the Canadian artists we are gonna be featuring on Independent's Day today and will do the same for the DMV artists on July 4. Enjoy and stay tuned for updates on Independent's Day in the upcoming months as the project starts to come together in a more concrete way. But before I get into that, let me post this....
Labels: Admin, Connoisseurs of Culture, Happy Holidays, Its a Canada Thing
Sunday, November 28, 2004
For Promotional Use Only - what's the 411?
Many of the items covered on this site have been supplied by record companies or marketing firms representing labels and artists. Different Kitchen has no problem featuring projects promo'd like this on the site especially if it's something I would be into anyway, think fits the steez of the site and/or that readers will dig. If you're looking for some coverage for your projects, you can send promos (email me for the mailing address).
Format-wise,
To send music via online (Hi quality mp3 files, at least 160k bits/second or better), the easiest, most direct way is to visit the Different Kitchen Soundcloud Dropbox and follow the instructions there.
Besides soundcloud, usershare or YouSendIt mp3 download links are the next most convenient download link platforms. Other acceptable platforms include: , Fileblaze, supashare or zippyshare because they have streaming options or mediafire because there's no waiting time before being able to download but NOT Sharebee and DEFINITELY NOT zshare - sh-t is TRASH and NOT recommended.
Favorite genres are (of course) hip hop as well as soul/R&B, reggae, brit poppy, alternative and indie stuff, UK vibes (UK funky/UK hip hop/garage/2-step/grime etc.), DFA/post-punky electro-disco-punk and dance-rock sounds and rare groove/breakbeat/reggae reissue compilations. Books will be covered if they fit the scope of the site (check the archives if you're not sure). I am open to checking out unsigned stuff too but will be ultra-selective about what makes the cut. Note also: some stuff, depending on what it sounds like, may end up getting covered on my other blog, The In Crowd.
Some additional submission tips: if you're an UNSIGNED or UNKNOWN artist I am probably not gonna check out your whole mixtape to see if I want to post it. You should either send a couple links to the best tracks on it (using one of platforms mentioned above) or better yet, a link to the whole thing as a bandcamp (the new and better MySpace IMHO and HIGHLY RECOMMENDED - check out their demo video),
Track or single submissions work better if you send a promo pic or two, single or album/mixtape cover artwork (or a YouTube or MySpace video link) and your website, twitter and MySpace site URL's to save me the trouble of having to hunt that info down myself. I'm just sayin'....
I would love to feature all materials I am sent but, due to the volume of material I get nowadays, reserve the right not to cover stuff sent to me and will also generally omit anything I'm not into rather than waste my (and your) time trashing it unless there's a compelling editorial reason for doing so. Also don't be offended if I do not respond to your email correspondence, I have other commitments that keep me very busy too. How I keep up this crazy site as is, is a mystery to me!
For any questions not covered, holla at the 'kid' here. You can also use this address to email me mp3 files via usershare, YSI, zippyshare, mediafire or any of the other recommended platforms listed above or video & audio streams.
Labels: Admin
