Altered Zones

In the year-and-a-half or so since I first heard his Bong Voyage release-- incidentally, the first album I ever received from an artist intended exclusively for MediaFire download-- I've seen Run DMT's Mike Collins go from making abstract sound collages to fronting his own jam band and even transforming google-searched LiveJournal entries into ballads for acoustic guitar. He first began contacting me under the pseudonym "Kirby Adams," and has since told me many an elaborate yarn about traveling America by freight train. These days, Mike is doing a whole lot less drifting, and has set up semi-permanent shop in Baltimore to crank out the first releases for his brand cassette tape and "home video" label, Culture Dealer.

First on the menu is a so-called Video Door VHS collection, which compiles "mental maps, warped perspectives, dream exploits, nose cameras, [and] audio-visual experiments" from some twelve artist and musician friends (including AZ fave Miko Revereza), and which we can expect to be about as bizarre as DMT's shape-shifting persona. Culture Dealer also currently has three tapes for sale: one from each half of the equally protean/prolific Montreal-Brooklyn duo Tonstartssbandht, and Dreams, Run DMT's first full-length release in over a year. The scorched wah guitar and motown-inspired bassline on "Romantic," below, promise a particularly raised lighter-worthy iteration of the DMT sound. --Emilie Friedlander, Altered Zones

MP3: Run DMT: "Romantic"

Visit Culture Dealer for more info