News From The Front

Due to an overwhelming need for the cool kids to disrespect nerd people even in adult life, the whole evening at Crash Mansion on Sat. night is moved up an hour. That means: Shael Riley will be on at 7, Clara Lafaro at 8, Optimus Rhyme at 9, and MC Frontalot at 10.

Perhaps you feel secure in your “street wisdom” that shows are always an hour later than scheduled in Manhattan… but not this Saturday night. The whole club gets handed over to coke-addled scenester bimbos and their sunglasses-at-night-wearing dates for a private party at 11:00 sharp. So heed the schedule!

Minitour is coming! Optimus gets on a plane for their first-ever East Coast rocking. Cambridge, MA, explodes on Friday (with Shael Riley and Nate Van Ill)! New York gets immolated by the hottness on Saturday (again withShael)! We take Sunday off but then the District shatters into seven thousand pieces on Monday evening (with special guest: comedy plus music times awesome equals Doug Powell)! Does this all this sound a little violent, a bit dangerous? Don’t fret, it is an excess of figurative language. All towns will survive sort of intact! See the proper schedule on the calendar.

Tickets at the door(s). If you’re not busy standing in line for other things.

Dammit! Myf of Metamystiks is canceled for Front’s DC gig, on account of the venue not letting their youthful asses in, even just to be onstage. That means we’re on the lookout for an opener for DC on Mon 10/23. Help us out!

Hey! You can get a DVD-R of Frontalot’s performance in Atlanta from the May tour. How do you do that? Go to Vaguely Qualified Productions’ site and give them a $25 donation. Then you get the DVD-R as a gift. It’s like a PBS tote bag, except instead of supporting public broadcasting you’ll be getting your name in the credits of the MC Frontalot/Nerdcore Hip-Hop documentary. And instead of toting books you’ll be watching a concert performance. On your DVD player.

Do you like MC Lars? It is “post-punk laptop rap” as opposed to “nerdcore hip-hop” but if you have “post-” anything in the description of your music, we deem you nerdcore. So there. Lars and Front join forces to rock theBowery Ballroom on December 19th. Be in New York on that evening to participate.

Also, stop buying bongs. What’s wrong with you people.

Front was on Channel 4 the other night, in a country where the whole populace can agree on what number each channel has. It was some show called Whatever. Here’s hoping it airs again. ‘Cause Front is eager to launch into the exciting world of royalties.

Lots of new remixes posted over at the OSB page! Automated uploading of your remixes is working too. And the source kit for Listen Close posts this very evening.

Minitour updates! Looking pretty likely that Boston/New York/DC is the agenda, but stay tuned for a last-minute Sunday night addition, just in case. Shael Riley is now opening Boston (Cambridge) and New York. Myf ofMetamystiks Inc will open DC, with SGX backing him up. Ummmm, speaking of DC, we gave you some shittyinfo on the venue, going so far as to list it at the wrong club. The show is in fact at The Red & The Black. Sorry about that!  Calendar for details.

Check out the latest episode of Solipsistic Nation for many nerdcore interviews. And oh hells yes, the fifth volume of Rhyme Torrents is out.

Boston show added to October minitour! It’s at the aptly named Western Front in Cambridge on Friday 10/20. Shael Riley opens. Details here.

Are you in (or near) DC and have always wanted to open for Front or Optimus? Maybe you can. Send us a link to your best song. Also, be willing to do a 30-minute set in exchange for drink tickets, bus fare, and a hug.

Newsflash! Baddd Spellah’s Frontalot-featuring Wagnerian remixery kicked ass in the CBC competition. Hear the song on the music page and check Baddd’s winnerly interview. Our fave nerdcore team got roughly 4x the votes of the 2nd-placer. Such things have happened before and no foul play is suspected. Were it a close race, you might want to keep an eye on the bean counters.

DC show added to Frontalot/Optimus Rhyme minitour! It’s Mon, Oct 23, at DC9 The Red & The Black. See the calendar for details. Looks like Philly on that Sunday night and maybe Pittsburgh on Tues. Is it cool to say “Philly?” Do we care if we’re “cool?” Still working on Boston area for Fri 10/20. Can you aid us? Every respectable venue is booked solid. We’re thinking of punk-rocking it and doing a DIY show with aid of some equipment-heavy dance kids in the area. But we still need a nice room that fits 150 and has an elevated stage. Perhaps where you have your math club meetings? Let us know.

New song! It is “Rhyme of the Nibelung.” Sorry about the Teutonic title; couldn’t be helped. This one is by our boy Baddd Spellah, with Front featured on vox. Hopefully, tomorrow it wins the Remix the Ring contest over at CBC. Wait, remix competitions? There is a site devoted to them, with eight versions of Front’s Braggadocio. Might not be too late to vote there either.

Also online: Front interviewed by Twisted Pair Radio and The 8-Bit Show. Rembember how we used to get on the air? It’s better now, even if “air” is not always involved. And speaking of ewwwwTubey things (we were not speaking of them, but let us go on), you can find all sorts of stuff if you search properly. Not just Frontal content, either. Everything from dark Reznory dreams of T.O.S. slash to the Lindy hip-hop. It’s so difficult to despise that site, though you, like us, probably try your best. Here’s some video you can really get into hating (unless you think it’s hilarious) (like Front kind of does).

Penny Arcade Conventions! They continue to have occurred recently. Do you need the proof of a low-res video interview with MC Front? Such proofs are hard to trust when the mesh and textures are available to simulate and screen-cap any photorealistic Frontalot fantasy situation you might devise. We know, of course, that the only proper way to play a video game with Front in it is to boot up Add’s original Spacers. It is a passtime available now only to members of our vaulted VSP.

Hey! Frontalot will be doing a show in New York City on October 21st at Crash Mansion. Optimus Rhyme joins him there! An evening of nerdish rapping the likes of which are seldom seen. Yet it may be seen four or five times in late October as the OR/MCF minitour takes shape.

Do you have a wonderful and serious lead on an appropriately sized and well equipped venue in Boston/Cambridge? How about DC? Write in to booking@frontalot.com if so. Pittsburgh is in the works. It is not impossible that Cleveland will follow suit. We apologize to you, the Frontalot front-page enthusiast; we do not usually seek booking aid so nakedly, so publicly. But we are between agents at the moment. And how often do we get to team up with The Optimus for their east coast debut? (by semantic necessity: once ever.)

Did you notice that the Elmo’s Potty Time DVD is out? Although this sounds like the sort of information a frontalot.com news post might leverage towards a series of engaging and pithy lies, we instead announce this DVD’s release in service of a solemn truth: the rapper who, in the closing third of the program, leads aspiring young toilet users through their tour of the toilet paper factory is none other than our own MC. His Sesame Workshop debut makes a great gift for any youngster contemplating independence from diapers — and to be honest, none of us are so great at using the bathroom that we can’t benefit from the occasional refresher course.

As Penny Arcade Expo gets methodically scrubbed and vaccumed out of the Meydenbauer (never to return), those who attended must struggle to reintegrate with normal life. Or they can be all like jeers to that, keep the musky Rain-Slick Precipice shirt on, sign up for a five-cases weekly Bawls delivery, plug that fun-ass zombie game into the 360 and just live that way until Gabe and Tycho are ready to host again.

2500 such PAX folk jammed in to see Front’s set Saturday night. The sabers swung. The palms shot skyward in unison when it was time for nerdcore to rise up. Front was overwhelmed with the sheer holleriness of a crowd that size. He thanks you all for your swarming, as well as your many kind words and handshakings at his booth! Afterwards, Enforcer Lee and a number of Neskimos aided Front in an all-night drunken revelry poetry discussion that culminated in a rather large number of police officers swarming the Hyatt. Our friendly MC, you’ll be glad to learn, avoided legal entanglements and escaped with a Natty Lite.

Hello internet peoples! It is the beginning of a new era for frontalot.com. Do you dig the post-robotech color skew? Do you love the pathetically “Web 1.0” fixed-width column design? And hows about them bran spanky newsite features?

There’s an mp3 page. There has always been one of those, but this one’s neater. Featured under Singles is the brand new release, Goth Girls, from the CD Nerdcore Rising. And as the Valued Suckers (aka members of Front’s bizarre and cultish paid-entry fanclub; beware them or become them) decide which songs are their favorites, you are slowly able to sort the mp3s (and most other site content) by popularity. Because popularity is important. That’s why we’re all so keenly aware of how indie we are. And of which jerkoffs called us “nerd” across the courtyard in 7th grade. Well who’s laughing now, Jed Guildersleve? Who has an entire rap career based on that very epithet? Not you! Also, there are some OGGs on the music page, by popular (popular!) demand. And more to come.

There’s a video page these days. There’s a new version of the image galleries, and now you can actually seepictures of MC Frontalot there. We use the italics to drive home the incredible irony of the fact that this feature is premiering in year seven of the site. And we don’t mean Canadian chanteuse irony. Good solid American irony. The info page remains a doofy clearing house for overwritten site copy that does not belong elsewhere. Plenty of new minor details there. Like a faq question or two. And a calendar.

The Open Source Beats Project is launched at long long last. Front has been promising this for the last four years to all DJs who write in requesting a capella tracks. And now, without warning, it happens. For launch we have not got automated DJ registration, fancy uploading, or very many source kits. A distant Phase III or IV of the project will include version branching and source control so that DJs can actually work together on remixes. Patent pending.

The BBS (once a VSP hideout) has opened to the public. Front is still busy skinning it, so if you find a broken-looking page, have patience. If you find real errors there or anywhere in the site, though, do please write in with a bug report.

If you like your nerdcore in text form, check out the new lyrics archive or the dorknotes section.

This is the site Front always wanted to offer you internet peoples, and now after many months of toil, voila. Front owes a great deal to his all-volunteer, all-genius dev squad, without whom you would still be staring at the 2002 green box version of the site. So big ups to: Colin, Blob, OrionsGlory, Squashua, Opiate, and Yuki! Front owes you guys big.

Isn’t there other exciting shit going on this week? Oh, yeah: Front’s in the print versions of Wired and TimeOut, and rocks his second-ever quadruple-digit crowd at PAX on Saturday night. Yaaaawn. New website!!

frontalot.com version four point zero! Goodbye green old version 2.1 [RIP 2002-2006]. How, you ask, did you miss version three? It got scrapped halfway through production and its central design element was inherited by the VSP for their special fun page. Does anyone remember V.1.0? It looked like this.

So anyhows, onward and upward. This news post is welcoming the beta squad. There will be more news when the site opens to the public in a few days.