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Tonight: Herd Fest Day 1

June 15, 2017

buffaBLOG is proud to launch the first day of events for this year’s Herd Fest. A lot of planning and curating went into crafting these shows and we are psyched to gather some of the most buzzed about local and regional acts for your viewing/listening pleasure. We encourage you to seek out bands you are not familiar with, and bounce around from venue to venue to get a real feel for what Western New York’s music scene is like in 2017. Mohawk Place opens it doors at 7pm for a night that will please any music fan. Set to open are up-and-coming indie rock act Hundred Plus Club, scene staples dreambeaches, Ithaca buzzing emcee Sammus, and the unveiling of the new project God Save the Queen, a collaboration between DJ Mario Bee and Mic Excel. $7 cover. NIetzsche’s also has a stacked line-up. Starting off the night will be whiskey folk act[...]

Sammus – “Song About Sex”

November 30, 2016

Ithaca’s Sammus hits a nerve with her single “Songs About Sex.” The fiery track speaks to sexual experiences (both good and bad) from a women’s perspective. The femcee talks about great sex with shitty people, poignantly expressed in the line “I can’t judge girl, I’ve been there I’ve done that, I’ve cum dumb hard so I run back.” She also details the all-too-real threat of assault, rounding the bases of a track ripe with emotion. The song’s beat flips an elevator music sample and brings it into the 2010s. I could explain this track front and back but Sammus’ words do it more justice on the chorus; “This is a song about sex in which I do not condemn women for the realities in which they are living. We should not be forgetting, we should be forward living, you should be for what we can’t afford to keep on forgetting.”[...]

Tonight: Sammus

November 27, 2016

Thanksgiving holiday weekends in Buffalo really are a war of attrition beginning Wednesday and running through Saturday and into Sunday. Dreamland isn’t done yet however, hosting an evening of experimental/underground hip hop from Upstate New York featuring Ithaca’s Sammus along with Buffalo’s Hop Hop and We Stole The Show. Sammus (aka Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo) is a virtuoso behind and in front of the boards and an intellectual heavyweight, so be prepared to dance and ponder many, many things while enjoying material from her debut album Pieces In Space. Doors open at 6pm, music begins at 7pm, and admission is $6 or whatever you can pay (but don’t be stingy). Pieces in Space by Sammus

Sammus’ “Three Fifths” to be Featured in Independent Film Rodney

June 3, 2015

Music that comes from a place of social action is often some of the best. Amid a couple of years of perceived police brutality and persecution of African Americans, Ithaca rapper/producer Sammus releases “Three Fifths” for use in the forthcoming independent film Rodney. Sammus made the track to remind us “that black people are whole even though they are often treated like three-fifths of a human by law enforcement.” The “three fifths” element is in reference to the 18th century legislation that equated the lives of slaves to three fifths of a free man when determining representatives in Congress. Her message is represented in the lyrics of the chorus, where she raps “I wonder how much y’all judge is the worth of my soul? I seem to round up three fifths to a whole.” Sammus’ already-impassioned flow resembles that of fellow rapper-activist Kendrick Lamar when she approaches screams on lines[...]

Another M Gets a Clean Rerelease from Sammus

January 7, 2015

In June of last year, female rapper and Ithacan Sammus dropped Another M, a project reimagining the tale of classic video game character Samus Aran. The main character in the Metroid series, Samus was the first female protagonist for many gamers. Samus’ identity was ambiguous as she marched through the game, defeating anything in sight on her path of heroics. The artist Sammus drew parallels between herself and the character that had surprisingly profound affect of gender stereotypes on Another M. To kick off the new year, Sammus gave us another chance to discover a very cool, yet powerful project with a release of the clean version. The production of Another M has a distinct video game feel to it, a testament to Sammus’ past venture as a producer for games. It’s filled with arcade synths and blips and bloops, along with noises that sound just like action queues in a game. It’s as if[...]