GLORY!

Yes brothers and sisters, the next single from my acclaimed second LP, The Life Equation will be We Won’t Be Broke Forever ft. Gruff Rhys. That’s the beautiful artwork up there, created entirely by ME and my Wacom DTF 520. The background pays tribute to the work of the mighty Pete Fowler, whose joyous images were as much a part of the the Super Furry Animals’ allure to the teenage me as the music itself.

Included in the single package is a stunning and transcendent remix from dan le sac. The video for Broke is directed by Aaron Shrimpton, and is the third part of The Life Equation Trilogy that started with Nothing Lasts Forever.

Broke comes out on February 27th on digital download and limited edition radio promo CD. You will also be able to buy similarly limited edition prints and canvases of the artwork to put on your wall and brighten up your home.

MP3 – £3.99
FLAC – £3.99
CD (Plus download) – £5
8″ x 8″ Print (comes signed with download & CD) – £10
6″ x 6″ Framed canvas (comes signed with download & CD) – £25
Broke Bundle (everything!) –  £30

PRESS RELEASE:

SINGLE
Akira The Don – We Won’t Be Broke Forever Baby ft Gruff Rhys
Out February 27th on Living In The Future

We Won’t Be Broke Forever Baby is the euphoric new single from Akira The Don. Featuring Gruff Rhys (Super Furry Animals, Neon Neon) and produced by synth pop pioneer Stephen Hague (New Order, Pet Shop Boys, Blur), Broke is already getting radio play (Radio 1, 6 Music, record of the week on Awesome Radio) without having actually gone to radio yet, because it is a beautiful and inspirational anthem for our times.

The single bundle includes a sleek and Kirbyesque dan le sac remix that sounds like venus, and the instrumental, replete with personally approved Dollar sample.

The video, part three of Akira’s acclaimed The Life Equation Trilogy, is directed by Aaron Shrimpton (Scroobius Pip, Beardyman, B Dolan), co-stars Gruff Rhys, Envy and Eddie Argos (Art Brut, Everybody Was In The French Resistance…Now), and drops on February 13th.

We Won’t Be Broke Forever Baby is taken from Akira’s second album, The Life Equation, which will receive a nationwide physical release on March 5th.
Praise for The Life Equation:

• “Brilliant” – Grant Morrison (Batman, The Invisibles)
• “Spectacular… A real slap upside the head” – The 404
• “Glorious” – Subba Cultcha
• “The urgent and danceable truth” – Jeff Wells (Rigorous Intuition)
• “Triumphant” – Sun On The Sand

For more information, visit the best artist website in the world: http://www.akirathedon.com, or follow Akira on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/akirathedon

— Tuesday, January 31st, 2012

Today I worked on my swaggy new video, then I left the house in the freezing cold on my bicycle (finally, cold has arrived in the English winter!) I visited a Post Office, wherein I sent massive parcels to the four corners of the Earth – Sweden, America, Germany and Wales – then I went to the gym, ON MY OWN, and the spa, ON MY OWN. Usually I go with Jeres, and we talk about manly matters, but he has quit, as it is pretty expensive, and he’s already in another gym that has one of those tectonic plate thingamajigs in it.

I enjoined my lone spa. The place was pretty much deserted for some reason, and I did some pretty good thinking as I flitted between the minty super hot steam room and the ice cold plunge pool and the sauna, stopping every now and again to yank a big metal chain and upend a barrel full of ice water on my head. The sauna made me think of Shandaken, where I lived for a short while. Long time readers of this site might remember that strange episode. While we waited for my Interscope deal to sort itself out, myself and my friends rented a great big fuck off house up the side of a mountain in Upstate New York. It had a jacuzzi and a sauna in it, amongst loads of other weird things – like a porno with pictures of my old Camden flatmate in it, and weird and distressing diary notes purportedly written by a 14 year old alluding to deviant and illegal sexual activities that took place on the premises… they told me Bob Dylan lived there once, and the place was surrounded on all sides by angry and cacophonous racoons and other strange animals. Bears used to run off with our rubbish bags, tear them open and strew the contents around the mountainside. I mentioned it on one of my favorite songs that I did last year:

My American adventure feels like a long time ago now, and I have been missing that country of late. I was pondering this at the weekend, then suddenly a pair of Exciting American Opportunities presented themselves to me – entirely separate , yet rooted in the same city… a city I once got kicked out of a nightclub in at 7am by a stoney faced, Batman-jawed Lesbrarian, who told me to get my cigarette stinking Limey face out of her face before she set the seven foot hunk of bricks to her right on my pisstaking ass.

Two clues:

BZZZZKTPH

Tomorrow I will reveal the artwork for my next single, and details on how you can pr-order some rare Akira The Don art. I might also post a picture of me in a rabbit mask wielding a firearm. Peace be upon you, friend.

— Tuesday, January 31st, 2012

Weekend dies in 5 4 3 2…

I wish I could do that in supermarkets. Shout “5 4 3 2″ then start playing One Love that is. Or One Blood.

“5 4 3 2…”

When I am rich I am going to hire a band to follow me around for that sort of thing. I am also going to learn to tapdance.

Anyway.

To the channels!

This just in via Facebook: Lil B just hit the same sample me and Joey2tits did on Surrender from ATD20…

Great minds and all that. I’m considering a trip to The Bay, so if I see him, James Lillin, I will pass on your regards.

How’s your weekend been anyway? Mine’s been great thank you. I met a baby yesterday:

Babies all over the shop these days. A strange overabundance of girls amongst all the folks I know as well. Not one boy in ages. Just tons and tons of girls. I have no idea why. It’s probably just me, but if you’ve noticed this in your circle, let me know, and we’ll investigate. It might have something to do with the bees. Speaking of which, what happened with the bees anyway? Did anyone work out why they all died? Adam Fletcher, you out there?

Remixes keep on coming in. Shout out everybody fucking with my acapellas out there. There’s an updated list at the bottom of this post. This latest one’s from Dr Joseph Scott Stubblefield, and I was pretty sure Dr Stubblefield traded in turbo metal mixes, but this is on some Banjo Kazzoey And The Blooey Kabooey bouncing around on clouds type shiz. Dude also coulred in the sleeve in an ill fashion, SWAG HIM OUT. Hey Scott! How’s about sending me the instrumental for this baby? I kinda fancy spitting on it, as if ’twere a Nazi.

Aside from meeting babies and listening to remixes, I’ve been editing a music video (not Broke… Aaron’s on that, he assures me, and I’m gonna check in tomorrow). It is super fun because it’s all greenscreen, so I’ve been having a whale (trail) of a time super imposing myself on top of stuff. Finding Aaron and Tom was one of the best things that happened to me last year (and a lot of amazing things happened last year). Video was the big missing component in my artistic life. I feel like a kid that just discovered Lego or something. I just wanna play.

A nice side effect of video is that the chunks of time it takes to render things so you can see how they really are – 20 minutes here, 30 minutes there – those chunks are perfectly sized for allowing oneself to play quests on Skyrim. I battled my way through some dwarves caves today and found the fucking elderscroll. Swag me out!

Now, back to The Channels… This via Youtube:

Record companies are stupid part 32,964. A bet those coffers are looking swole with Megaupload out the way, huh? Anyway, thank you, sir. It’s folks like you that keep this ship sailing, may you live forever.

Oh yeah, Fuck ACTA.

DOWNLOAD: Akira The Don ft. Envy – I Am Not A Robot Acapella 139.997
DOWNLOAD: Akira The Don – Evangelion ft Pixel & Marvin The Martian Acapella 140
DOWNLOAD: Akira The Don – Fist of The North Star ft Littles Acapella
DOWNLOAD: Akira The Don – We Won’t Be Broke Forever Baby ft Gruff Rhys Acapella
DOWNLOAD: Akira The Don – I Am not Dead YEAH Acapella 105
DOWNLOAD: Akira The Don – Nothing Lasts Forever ft Envy Acapella 105
DOWNLOAD: Akira The Don – Video Highway Acapella
DOWNLOAD: Akira The Don – We Are Not Alone Acapella 125

— Monday, January 30th, 2012

RT @therealdanbrock: @akirathedon living in the future is my hoverboard cometh, I will touch sky before I die! #DONARMY

— Sunday, January 29th, 2012

It’s FRIDAY! And like I always do about this time, I’m thinking that I desperately need to write a super-catchy and amazing pop song called FRIDAY in order to replace poor doomed Rebecca Black’s version… if only in my own poor brain, which by this point is as tired of hearing the Ark Music contempi-classic to the point of near madness.

Rebecca Black gives kids a bad name anyway, with her lack of basic road safety and obsession with “haters” and red carpets and being famous. As if they didn’t have bad enough PR already. People who watch television and read newspapers seem to think that all children are vicious feral animals that’ll shoot you as soon as look as you. Completely normal childish behaviour is reinterpreted and exaggerated by the perma-hyserical media as proof of a society wide youth sickness that can only be treated with drugs and television.

They are also under the queer impression that bad and disrespectful behaviour amongst the youth was a purely modern phenomena, as if Just William and his pals weren’t constantly breaking and entering and throwing rocks at policemen and blacking fat men’s faces with boot polish back in 1922.

They are idiots, of course. All children are ace – or least, all children are ace until idiot adults smash all the love and joy our of them with their rules and their bad attitudes and their lack of patience or capacity for creative thought. Show me a kid that isn’t ace and I’ll show you a tragic victim of the rotten culture of Adulthood.

http://youtu.be/f6yGAQZqHZQ

Of course, most of these people who are convinced that children are all evil monsters that need locking up in dungeons and force feeding prescription medication until they shut up and stop having fun haven’t tried talking to any. If you take the time to talk to a kid, as if he or she were an actual human, like you, and not some weird little doll for you to patronise, you will find them to be most agreeable and excellent company. I met a bunch yesterday whilst out taking photos with Dr Ev, and they were all entirely ace – happy, funny, polite (waiting for us to finish snapping before waling past the camera, for instance), complimentary of my moustache, full of useful information (“there’s a really good place to take photos just over there,” offered one, and he was right), and pretty much just plain overjoyed to be.

They were down in London from Geordie land on a school trip, I believe, to visit the 2012 Olympic site that’s sprung up in my backyard over the past few years. It is pretty exciting to have the 2012 Olympic site spring up in one’s backyard, to be honest. I can see the main arena/alien landing pad from my studio window, and it is a fine, futuristic sight. It reminds me of those paintings that came with the LP of Jeff Wayne’s War of The Worlds, one of the greatest feats of audio storytelling of all time… or at least of the feelings those paintings inspired in me when I first looked upon them, when I was about 6. War Of The Worlds and the concept of an alien invasion scared the crap out of me when I was small, but now I’m big I know full well that yes, monsters exists, but they walk among us already, wearing suits and ties… but if you smile at them they freak out and their brains malfunction, so they’re not really all that scary at all.

Joy to the future!

— Friday, January 27th, 2012

I love living in the future, as you well know. Every day we are bombarded with fuckeries, but the glory outweighs all of that, in my humble opinion. Every day we are bombarded with glory, like cosmic rays.

When I was a little boy, my favorite toy was Lego. We’d inherited a bunch if it from somewhere, and we had a ton of the stuff in a bucket, that grew a little bigger every Christmas, like my Grandpa’s waistline. We used to pour it all out onto a blanket, and build cities and spaceships and monsters for hours, as the rain poured down outside. Lego was more primitive in those days. No stubble or eyepatches or any of that shit. I remember when Pirate Lego was introduced – the first Lego to have more than eyeballs and a smile on the little yellow heads. With Pirate Lego came the potential for a more expressive and individualised Lego. It was a revelation. I wrote letters to Lego Headquarters begging for Lego that was themed around my favourite things. I longed for Thundercats and He-Man lego. For Adam & The Ants and Anne Of Green Gables Lego. For me Lego.

Twenty odd years later, we’re in the future, my mate Gwilym just spent £300 on a giant Lego Star Wars construct of some kind, and these wonderful humans have made some goddamn Akira The Don Lego. There it is at the top of the post, with a copy of my most recent comic strip in hand. Resplendent. This is the future I dreamed of. Pinch me.

Ow.

OK, don’t pinch me. It hurts. Instead, join me in raising a glass to Gemma from Kitchbits, who made that lovely thing, and go swag them out with your custom. They make all sorts of cool stuff. That was the future I dreamed of – a future in which people made cool stuff… and here were are.

Check this out:

POW! How dope is THAT? Time, that amazing emcee I discovered via a Twitter add, in a manner that will likely never happen again, has been working on a video for our awesome transatlantic musical collaboration Full Metal Alchemist. Thatssright Bubba. A transatlantic video collaboration. For we dwell in the future, a glorious, hitherto unimagined era in which humas meet and create art between the physical world and that ghostworld… The Digital.

The video is gonna be flipping sweet. I’ve seen Time’s first bit. Like he says, it’s got everyting you could want… food. Bullets. A gun.

You need to check Time if you haven’t. He is amazing. He reminds me of me, but more cyberpunk. Check out his mixtape/album Ramenswag for a pretty fucking ace and trippy introduction to his world.

Meanwhile, another of my transatlantic rap superfriends, Bay Area boy wonder and Viper-rider ISSUE, has been speaking (digitally, natch), with the Seattle Times about our forthcoming collaborative project, World’s Finest.

I am very excited about this record. Issue sent me 22 pieces of music, by him, Georgio Momurder, Drew Money, Scoot Foo and Schwartz to consider for the thing, and I feel fucking spoiled. What are they putting in the water in The Bay lately? There is so much amazing music coming out of there it is getting stupid by this point. Issue’s new mixtape, Moonroof 2 dropped today, and it is a thing of incredible beauty and wonder, download it right now and turn the lights off. And if you haven’t checked it yet, here’s me and Issue’s second collaboration (the first was 17 Year Old Blonde Girl & A Bottle Of Acid from Saturnalia Superman), THE LAMBORGHINIS, from his awesome Pig mixtape.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtuzOdSfWjs

Meanwhile, the remixes keep coming in. This just came through Twitter:

I was like, yeah! And then I go this:

Which is pretty flipping fly. Works excellently during the verses and breakdown I thought. I think the choruses are a little abrasive for the tone of the music. Maybe if they were pitched down, or chopped up a lot, or overtly reverbed and brought down in the mix they’d sit easier. Either way, the music is brilliant. Propiau.

Propiau is pigeon Welsh for “props”, before you ask. And speaking of which, Zef and I went to Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club last night to take part in a LITERARY LIBRARY EXPERIENCE. Some weird mime people straight out of an episode of Spaced made noises at each other for 7 minutes, an Irishman told 95% of a fairy story an illiterate old friend of his had had transcribed from a dream, and Martin Carr and Eternaly Young Huw and Gruff Rhys performed a beautiful suite, held together by the oceaneesque strum of guitar triplets and delightful abortion-themed harmonising. It was a pretty surreal experience, now I think about it.

There they are, in front of a fucking massive and dope painting. I want to make a painting like that.

That’s one of the pieces of paper they gave us. Oh yeah, the night was called The American Forever, Etc. – A Library, a presentation of The Brautigan Book Club. I believe it is going to be a regular thing, celebrating the works of Richard Brautigan, of whom I must admit I had previously never heard.

And that’s me and my lil’ bro Zef. He lives in London now, so I can call him up at 5:30 pm and invite him out to gigs. That is a very special thing, brothers and sisters.

— Thursday, January 26th, 2012