Skip to main content
Eddie Rockerz VibeZ - curated playlists, mixes and music commentary

Dig the crates

Every playlist on the blog, sorted by where it takes you.

Browse all 600+ VibeZ

DJ Mixes & Series

The house sets, the Producer Series and the running volumes.

Show all 16Show fewer

Rockin’ To This Vol. 21

Sixty tracks, almost none of which you will have heard on the radio, and nearly all of which you will want to keep. This is what deep-crate curation looks like when someone actually does the listening.

The state of independent R&B, volume 21

There is a whole tier of contemporary soul music that operates entirely outside the major-label machinery — released independently or through small labels, discovered through playlists and Bandcamp and word of mouth, and often better than what the majors are putting out. This mix is a snapshot of that tier at a particular moment, and its value is precisely that it does not repeat what everyone else is playing.

The common thread is texture. These are records built on warm keys, live-feeling drums, generous reverb and vocals mixed close enough that you hear breath. Where mainstream R&B has trended toward sparseness, this world has gone the other way — toward density, chord changes, and arrangements that reward a second listen.

What to listen for

A few names to hold onto. Naomi Sharon ("Can We Do This Over") is the OVO Sound signee with the Sade-adjacent low register. Gaidaa ("Fly Away") is a Dutch-Sudanese singer whose writing is unusually literary. Halle — of Chloë x Halle — appears with "back and forth," a reminder of how much range she has outside the duo.

Full Crate shows up twice, with Shae Universe on "Stay" and Auryln on "Just Another Day" — the Dutch producer has quietly become one of the connective figures in this scene. Braxton Cook with NNAVY on "Weekend" brings a jazz saxophonist's harmonic instincts to a straightforward R&B setting.

Durand Bernarr ("Alone Again," with Ballad) is one of the most technically gifted vocalists working, with a background singing behind Erykah Badu. Amaria takes on Tom Petty's "Free Fallin'" and makes it unrecognisable in the best way.

The deeper cuts — Loie, ïnnü, Bathe, Jamilah Barry, Tia Gordon, Liza, THEHONESTGUY — are the reason to keep the playlist rather than cherry-pick it.

Sixty tracks. Put it on for the afternoon and note down what stops you.

Go deeper

The best way to use a mix like this is as a shortlist. Pick three names you did not know, go to their albums, and repeat next month.

For the infrastructure of this scene: Bandcamp remains where most of these artists make their actual money, and following them there tends to surface releases before playlists do. Labels worth watching include Foreign Exchange Music, Innovative Leisure and Rhythm Section International.

Historically, this lane descends fairly directly from the Soulquarians era — D'Angelo's Voodoo, Erykah Badu's Mama's Gun, Bilal's 1st Born Second — and from the UK broken-beat scene around Bugz in the Attic and 4hero. Both are worth the trip backwards.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Monty Alexander VibeZ

There is a moment on almost every Monty Alexander record where the jazz piano trio stops behaving like a jazz piano trio and starts behaving like a Kingston sound system. That moment is the whole point. Fifty tracks deep, this is the sound of a man who never asked permission to be two things at once. The pianist who brought Kingston to the Carnegie stage Monty Alexander was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1944, and by his teens he was already gigging around the island — close enough to the birth of ska and rocksteady to have absorbed it in his bones rather than learned it from records. He moved to the United States in 1961, and the origin story that follows is the kind that sounds invented: Frank Sinatra heard him playing in a Miami club, and Jilly Rizzo, Sinatra's friend and club owner, put him behind the piano at Jilly's in New York. From there Alexander fell in with Milt Jackson and Ray Brown, two of the most demanding rhythm partners in the music, and never really ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kashif VibeZ

Kashif is the reason a lot of 1980s R&B sounds the way it does — and the reason you can hear the difference between a synth bassline played by someone who understood bass and one programmed by someone who didn't. This is a producer's playlist, and the producer is everywhere. The architect of the synthesized soul record Kashif was born Michael Jones in Brooklyn in 1956, raised in foster care, and taught himself music young enough that by his teens he was touring with B.T. Express. What he did next reshaped a decade. In the early 1980s, as a producer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist, he was among the first to build R&B records around programmed synthesizers — the Minimoog bass, the Linn drum machine, the Fairlight — without letting them sound cold. That distinction matters. Plenty of producers adopted the new gear; Kashif made it groove . His basslines are played with the phrasing of a funk bassist, full of slides and ghost notes, which is why rec...
Post a Comment
Read more

De La Soul VibeZ (R.I.P Trugoy the Dove)

Trugoy the Dove died in February 2023, weeks before De La Soul's catalogue finally reached streaming after a fifteen-year legal deadlock. Thirty-one tracks, and a difficult kind of timing. Rest in peace, Dave David Jude Jolicoeur — Trugoy the Dove, later just Dave — formed De La Soul in Amityville, Long Island with Posdnuos and Maseo. Their 1989 debut 3 Feet High and Rising , produced with Prince Paul , remains one of the most inventive records in the history of the genre: dense with samples from Steely Dan to Johnny Cash to French language instruction tapes, funny, formally strange, and entirely uninterested in the postures rap was expected to strike. The consequence of that invention was a curse. The sample clearance landscape changed after Gilbert O'Sullivan sued Biz Markie in 1991, and De La Soul's early catalogue — built on hundreds of uncleared fragments — became legally impossible to license. For roughly fifteen years, their most important a...
Post a Comment
Read more