Ernest Dickerson is a director, cinematographer, and writer who has played a key role in some of the best and most important film and television of the past four decades. He got his start in the mid-1980s as the cinematographer on movies by his NYU film school pal Spike Lee. Ernest show every one of Spike’s movies up through 1992’s Malcolm X—a historic run that included She’s Gotta Have It, Do the Right Thing, and Jungle Fever, just to name a few.

Ernest struck out on his own with a hip-hop cinema classic, 1992’s Juice. The film, about four Harlem teenagers who slowly get dragged into a perilous situation, featured Tupac Shakur in his first starring film role—and also had cameos from hip-hop figures of the time like Treach, Queen Latifah, Red Alert, and Yo! MTV Raps hosts Fab 5 Freddy, Ed Lover, and Doctor Dre. A 25th anniversary edition of the movie, with tons of never-before-seen extras including an alternate ending, is available now.

But that’s not nearly all of Ernest Dickerson’s story. He has directed other great films like Surviving the Game, Demon Knight, and the Snoop Dogg-starring Bones. And he has helmed notable episodes of great TV series like The Wire and The Walking Dead. His latest project, out now on the festival circuit, is Double Play.

See http://theciphershow.com/episode/205/ for full show notes and comments.

Fred is a rapper who can say that hip-hop is in his blood, literally. Not only is he from the home of hip-hop, the Bronx, but his father also used to work at the NYC nightspot The Tunnel, whose hip-hop nights on Sundays, presided over by Funkmaster Flex, were legendary.

So it only makes sense that Fred would grow up to become one of the best rappers out there. His intricate punchlines and metaphors are the stuff of mixtape legend, and his talent has led him to collaborate with some of the biggest rappers, DJs, and producers in the game. Fred’s talent has also been recognized by XXL, who annointed him one of their Freshman class in 2011, alongside Mac Miller, Meek Mill, Yelawolf, and some guy named Kendrick. Fred’s newest project, out this past August, is Gordo.

See http://theciphershow.com/episode/217/ for full show notes and comments.

The Arsonists were a crew formed in Bushwick in the early 1990s. D-Stroy, who began his rap career in his early teens alongside famed DJ Tony Touch in the duo Touch and D-Stroy, helped to solidify a group that would come to consist of, among others, Freestyle, Jise One, Swel Boogie, and Q-Unique. After putting out several early singles, the group was the first hip-hop act to sign to Matador Records, a label better known for indie rock. They released their debut album As the World Burns in 1999.

An intense touring schedule and its attendant stresses put pressure on the crew, and it splintered after the 2001 follow-up Date of Birth. But the Arsonists are back with a new album, Lost in the Fire, and a reissued version of their debut. Lost in the Fire features a mix of old but previously unreleased material alongside new songs.

See http://theciphershow.com/episode/235/ for full show notes and comments.

Jericho Jackson is a group made up of producer Khrysis and rapper Elzhi. Khrysis is best known for his work with the rap collective the Justus League, which counts among its members 9th Wonder. He is currently a member of 9th’s production team the Soul Council. In addition to his North Carolina crew, Khrysis has produced for Sean Price and Heltah Skeltah, Jean Grae, Evidence, Talib Kweli, Black Thought, and many others.

Dedicated Cipher listeners will remember Elzhi from our talk with him on episode 152. The Detroit rapper came to a lot of fans’ attention during his time as a member of Slum Village. He followed that up with a staggering series of solo albums, including the Nas reinvention Elmatic and the deeply personal Lead Poison.

Khrysis and Elzhi’s recent joint album is called Khrysis and Elzhi Are Jericho Jackson.

See http://theciphershow.com/episode/247/ for full show notes and comments.

Anjelah Johnson, Comedian, whose comedy special "Not Fancy," is on Netflix, joins Joey Diaz and Lee Syatt live in studio.

Jayson Thibault, comedian and host of the "Punch Drunk Sports Podcast" joins Joey Diaz and Lee Syatt live in studio.

Meundies.com Go to meundies.com/joey for 20% off of your first order plus free shipping in the US and Canada

Jayson Thibault, comedian and host of the "Punch Drunk Sports Podcast" joins Joey Diaz and Lee Syatt live in studio.

Mike Tyson, the youngest ever heavyweight boxing world champion, an actor, performer, and host of the "Hotboxin with Mike Tyson" podcast, joins Joey Diaz and Lee Syatt LIVE. 

This podcast is brought to you by:

A stroke of luck made the rocker's instrumental track "Sirius" one of the most recognizable intro songs in sports history. Continue reading…

Nick Hancock to host stage show with TV sporting legends.

Warwick Arts Centre have announced their summer film series, including some whip-smart comedies guaranteed to make you forget the lousy weather.

Martin Longley gets into Chinese jaw harp, Fellini soundtracking, Japanese metal and whaledrone saxophone...

One night only chance to meet former world heavyweight champion.

Tickets on sale for night with world champion.

It's an outlaw country Mother's Day tribute. Continue reading…

Impact Soundworks has launched its free video series Impact Soundworks Academy, delivering lessons and tutorials on a wide range of music production, composition, and business topics, created by professionals and experts. The series aims to give you immediate, practical, and actionable knowledge you can use to improve your music, your workflow, and your career. In […]

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Resonate Sound Design has announced the release of a new preset expansion pack for the popular Serum wavetable synthesizer by Xfer Records. Cyber delivers over 120 fresh presets. If you create trailer, cyberpunk, dark synthwave, darkwave or similar genre music, then this is the preset pack for you…not that you can’t use these for a […]

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Plugin Boutique has launched a sale on Sonarworks Reference 4, offering 20% the sound calibration software for a limited time. Reference 4 removes unwanted coloration from studio speakers and headphones. Sonarworks is on a mission to ensure everybody hears sound the way it was meant to be. Across all devices. Calibrate sound on your current […]

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Sonuscore has announced the release of a free version of its Kontakt library Ethnic Flute Phrases, a scoring tool made to breathe life into every composition. The free Ethnic Flute Phrases library includes over 100 live recorded ethnic flute phrases, providing an expressiveness which is unachievable in traditional sampling. This freebie offers an insight into […]

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Sonixinema has announced the launch of the Sound of a Brighter Future Composing Competition, an opportunity to share your positive outlook and win store vouchers. Positivity, hope, and unity are surrounding us like never before. It is allowing us to experience life in a new way, and is the perfect time to do what we […]

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Kilohearts has announced a sale on selected plugins, offering a 50% discount for the next few weeks. We are offering 50% off some of our most popular effects (VST/AU/AAX/Snapin). Trance Gate, Tape Stop, Reverser, and Resonator are all HALF-PRICE for a limited time. Chop your sounds up, wind them down, flip them over and make […]

The post Save 50% on Kilohearts Trance Gate, Tape Stop, Reverser, and Resonator plugins appeared first on rekkerd.org.

Sonic Sirius has announced availability of the Abc Soundset, a collection of 128 presets for the Messiah by Memory Moon, a software synthesizer inspired by the Prophet-5 polyphonic analog synth by Sequential Circuits. The soundset is suitable for Synth-Pop, New Wave, Electro, and other modern synth music. It includes arpeggios, bass, keys, leads, pads, and […]

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Sonarworks has announced SoundID Listen, a desktop application that brings personalized sound to anyone listening to their headphones on Mac or Windows, using their perfect personal sound profile called SoundID. SoundID represents a paradigm shift in audio quality, moving away from the traditional one-size-fits-all approach, to personalizing sound for everyone as an individual. SoundID unlocks […]

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Native Instruments has announced a sale on Sonokinetic, offering up to 70% off on its orchestral and cinematic instrument libraries for Kontakt for a limited time. Playful, independent, and unique, Sonokinetic phrase-based instruments bring dazzle and delight to every composition. Now with 70% off the collection, 50% off 15 individual instruments, and the brand-new Ibrido […]

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Plugin Boutique has announced an exclusive sale on reMIDI by SongWish, a MIDI sampler plugin that allows you to grab harmonies and melodies from compositions of past greats and get the most out of your royalty-free MIDI loops. If you can sample audio to help kickstart productions, why not sample midi? You can isolate melodies […]

The post Sample MIDI with SongWish’s reMIDI plugin, on sale for $19 USD appeared first on rekkerd.org.

Sonixinema has announced a sale on the Abstract steel percussion library for Kontakt, offering 30% off during the month of May. Abstract is a steel percussion library like no other. Recorded in exceptional detail and performed with a range of sticks, mallets, bows, this wonderful library features a range of energetic hits and abstract effects. […]

The post Sonixinema offers 30% OFF Abstract Unique Metallic Percussion for Kontakt appeared first on rekkerd.org.

Plugin Boutique is offering the ERA 4 Voice Leveler plugin from Accusonus free of charge with any purchase during May. The ERA 4 Voice Leveler is an audio restoration tool that is incredibly useful for normalizing the volume levels of speech or dialogue recordings in seconds. If you are you a podcaster, videographer, vlogger, dialogue […]

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Reason Studios has announced the release of version 11.3 of Reason, bringing the famed Reason Rack as a native AAX plugin to Avid Pro Tools music software. The announcement was made by Mattias Häggström Gerdt, Reason Product Manager, and underscores the company’s ongoing commitment to the Reason platform of instruments, plugins and music production software. […]

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Plugin Boutique has launched an exclusive sale on the Atmos & SFX Bundle, featuring over 2,200 state-of-the-art SFX samples, loops and atmos by Sounds of Revolution and Audio Boutique. From robotic sound effects, complex impacts, mangled kick-free loops, mystic atmos and soundscapes, unique vocal fragments and much more, expand your sample collection with this unique […]

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HISS and a ROAR has announced the release of Scaffolding, a new sound library that features recordings of a scaffolding support structure. While musicians relish playing their instrument, gaining access to a new sonic playground for a sound FX recordist is a heavenly joy! So it was a pleasure to eventually find a scaffolding company […]

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Plugin Boutique has launched an exclusive sale on Bass Engine, offering 50% off the hip hop bass instrument by DopeSONIX. With Bass Engine we have studied the last three decades of Hip Hop production and have the selected the most representative bass sounds of that era. These basses include everything from dusty jazzy upright bass […]

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Plughugger has announced the release of Anthology 1, a new soundset for the Omnisphere virtual instrument which sets the focus on analog sounds from the 80s. The pack brings the sounds of some of the biggest classics of the time: Roland Jupiter 8, Oberheim OB8, Yamaha CS80 and the Prophet 5. The sound design concept […]

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Triple Spiral Audio has announced the release of the Norse Myths soundset by Subsonic Artz, a collection of over 150 presets for the Diva virtual analog synth by u-he. To bring this project to life, we’ve taken inspiration from Norse Mythology and the music from composers such as Olafur Arnalds, Nils Frahm, Uno Helmersson and […]

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J&J, already the world's biggest maker of health-care products, is fulfilling its goal of gaining a new drug category with the transaction and dealing a blow to France's Sanofi, which had also courted Actelion.

The Bengaluru-based company plans to open 25 such 600-1000 square feet stores over a span of 12 months.

CoreCivic runs the facility that houses inmates for the U.S. Marshals Service, city of Mesa, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

How do we love the land, even as we participate in doing damage to it? How do we honor those who have come before us, even as we acknowledge the destruction they advanced? These are the questions that came to me as I read “Pennsylvania Furnace” a new book of poems by Julie Swarstad Johnson. In poems that weave effortlessly, sometimes magically, between past and present, Johnson considers the significance of resource extraction in relation to American lives. Her poems step back and forth across the continent, juxtaposing the Arizona desert-cities of the author’s home with the ridges and valleys of central Pennsylvania. Here in Appalachia, where her parents are from, Johnson finds the remnants of Pennsylvania’s booming 19 th -century ironmaking industry and goes on a journey to learn about those old furnace stacks that stand, as one poem puts it, “like lone towers left from fortresses / by the roadside.” Like students of this local history who came before her, Johnson acknowledges that

Nearly 90 years after his death, the name Thomas Edison still stands as a synonym for invention and technical wizardry. Yet aside from a short list of his inventions, I couldn’t say that I knew all that much about him. So, when I saw that Edmund Morris had written a new biography—titled simply “Edison”—I couldn’t resist learning more. Morris is perhaps best known as the author of the magisterial three volume biography of Theodore Roosevelt, of which “The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt” won the Pulitzer Prize. While not as long as that combined output, at over 800 pages, “Edison” is still a bit daunting. But with a life as long and productive as Edison’s, the book never lagged, presenting a fascinating record of both disappointment and achievement. Morris made a curious choice as a biographer. At the start of the work, we see Edison’s last race against time to come up with a substitute for rubber for tires. From there, each chapter covers a decade of his life, proceeding backwards. From his

There is a point in Colson Whitehead’s novel, “The Nickel Boys,” when you think—when you hope—that things will turn out for the better for his protagonist, Elwood Curtis. Elwood is living in New York, he has a job, an apartment, and a girlfriend. He has developed plans to start his own moving company. At that point, you begin to have hope that all the atrocities and injustices Elwood endured—including the years he spent being abused at the Nickel Academy, a reform school in Florida, were not his undoing, even as you know that probably isn’t the case. “The Nickel Boys” is Whitehead’s ninth novel and is based on the true story of a 1960s reform school for boys. Elwood should have never been at Nickel. Before arriving there, things were going well for him. He was a serious, hardworking, and cerebral young man. His grandmother had shielded him from most external forces. For example, she got him a job at a store to keep him busy, and kept him away from the speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King

Prestige will also be launching new products in water purifier segment.

Jessie Sage is a sex worker who writes and speaks publicly on issues related to sex work, feminism, and social justice. James Tison is a stand-up comedian in New York who uses humor to fight stigma against his LGBTQ identity and life with HIV. Sage and Tison recently spoke at an event at Penn State called “Facts not Fear: A Night to Fight Stigma,” and talked with WPSU about fighting the sigma their communities face. This Take Note interview talks about sex work and might not be suitable for children to hear.

Penn State assistant teaching professor Shaheen Pasha is an advocate for more journalism courses to be taught in prison. She talked with WPSU about a reporting class she taught to both prisoners and journalism students in Massachusetts, the benefits of learning about our mass incarceration system from the people who are living it and her plan to create a program here in central Pennsylvania. TRANSCRIPT: Min Xian: Welcome to Take Note on WPSU. I'm Min Xian. Shaheen Pasha is an assistant teaching professor at Penn State's College of Communications and advocates for more journalism courses to be taught in prison. Previously, she was an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she launched a social justice journalism course focused on mass incarceration at the Hampshire County Jail bringing together prisoners and UMass journalism students. Pasha was a 2018 Knight Visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard. She's also a veteran journalist who has covered legal issues,

WPSU is traveling to towns across central and northern Pennsylvania to collect oral history recordings. In Lock Haven we paired with a college journalism class and had students find someone interesting to interview. Lock Haven University student Samantha Wilson talked with Ryan Brinkman, a former pro-surfer who now teaches Brazilian Jiu Jitsu in Lock Haven.

As a part of WPSU’s radio, TV and web project “The Vietnam War: Telling the Pennsylvania Story,” we’re bringing you oral history interviews with Vietnam veterans. Susan Patterson talked with her grandfather Bruce Heim about a convoy operation he led during the Vietnam War and what it was like to leave for the war.