Supah-supah excited for tonight’s Erykah Badu concert on Governor’s Island here in New York City. We’ll have the backdrop of the the Manhattan skyline with her saucy beats. Badu is one of my favorites and…just go to the concert and let your sould momma out! ‘Nuff said on her.

The opener is Janelle Monáe and she’s been riding a wave of positive PR recently; I enjoyed Paper Mag’s Summer 2009 issue where they write about her multidimensional career approach, tight pressed outfits, and pompadour reaching to the 2^nd floor. The got rave reviews for her performance on the recent No Doubt! 2.0 tour and I hear her stage persona is amazing.

Originally from Kansas, Janelle’s father was hooked on drugs and she used her imagination to escape from the challenges. She was educated in New York City and then moved to Atlanta where she collaborated to create the Wondaland Arts Society, a kick-ass wack-a-doodle performance art collective. That got Big Boi’s, of Outkast, attention who put her on two of his albums and a video. Janelle released The Chase EP which was to be the first of four concept EPs about a character named named Cindi Mayweather from the far future. That got Sean “Diddy” Combs attention…and now we’ve got a rising hip-hop/pop star.

Several years back, I ran across an underground remix of a song by Lady Sovereign. Who was this rapping/spitting chick; grimey, dirty, sexy? Damn it sounded good. Later, she released her EP Vertically Challenged and then blew up with her first full album Public Warning on Def Jam records. Between festivals and a smashing concert at Neumos in Seattle, I’ve seen her live three times; each amazing and filled with bouncing energy.

Lady went dark for a while and reading her Myspace, I see she ran into some shit that hit her hard. She says she out of that now and working on her new album “Jigsaw” to be released in April 2009. As a tease, she’s released the single “I Got You Dancing” from her upcoming album along with the video.

Tonight, I went to the New York City Ableton User Group. We’re lucky to have an Ableton office in NYC, so we regularly have their employees also there. The featured performers tonight were Baba Israel, Yako and Core Rhythm.

It was two hours of great music w/ beatboxing, hip-hop beats and freestyling. After a performance, they would answer questions and share how they use Ableton Live for both production and live performance. Stellar.

I’ve been fooling around with Live for two years now; first with applying effect to my live DJ sets, then creating the remixes used for the choreographed dance in my last show 4 Seasons; and now creating original beats, music, and noise. This past Sunday 9 Sept, I was at Share.DJ and was fooling around producing live noise in a collaborative environment. Part of the time I was playing alongside a cello and a thumb piano thingy. You can hear a clip of my portion of the racket in the player here or over in the navigation column to the side.