Stories by Anupa Mistry : Contently

PROJECTS

397 projects for 33 clients

fader

This is what Bangladesh has been up to since making all your favorite bangers

One of the most brilliant innovations in rap is the tag, a vocal sample or sonic quirk in the first few seconds of a song identifying that track’s producer. Easy access to digital tools and the need to identify your work within the stream made tags ubiquitous and helped turn producers into stars in their own right. One of the first tags seared into my memory is by the Des Moines-born, Atlanta-based producer Bangladesh. It’s a strangled male voice croaking out “Baaangladesh,” and you know it b...

View

The Globe And Mail

Art-rock collective Yamantaka // Sonic Titan returns to Pureland with loud, whimsical new album

On the day Yamantaka // Sonic Titan released its third full-length album, Dirt, the Toronto-based collective spent an afternoon traipsing around New York’s beloved East Village, poking into the neighbourhood’s last traces of weird.
I met all six members of the Juno and Polaris Prize-nominated art-rock collective in front of the avant garde La MaMa Theater, where vocalist Ange Loft has performed with the groundbreaking New York Indigenous performance company, Spiderwoman Theater. We browsed a ...

View

The Globe And Mail

Childish Gambino’s This Is America is a brutal and necessary look at black death

Anupa Mistry is an arts and culture journalist from Toronto currently living in Brooklyn, N.Y.
In the new music video for This Is America, Childish Gambino, the Grammy-winning musical persona of actor and screenwriter Donald Glover, shoots 11 black people at point-blank range. The video’s macabre tension mirrors an aesthetic that is increasingly dominating Mr. Glover’s critically acclaimed FX series Atlanta, a dark comedy centred on four friends living in the Southern metropolis. As of late, ...

View

fader

Kelis’s Flesh Tone is peak pop, and it deserves more credit

In 2003, Diddy enlisted Kelis for an experiment: a Euro club track called “Let’s Get Ill.” Before EDM penetrated America and before hip-hop and R&B became the polyglot genres they are today, Diddy and Kelis channeled the spirit and sound of raving in Ibiza on a single that’s mostly been lost to time. This was two years before Madonna put out Confessions On A Dancefloor, four years before Britney Spears’s Blackout, and six years before David Guetta templated pop-dance crossovers with his Kelly...

View

Pitchfork

The Secret Life of Planets

Zaki Ibrahim’s second album is a future-soul marvel that connects sounds across time and oceans, creating thrilling moments of pop music synthesized through her wise and worldly vision.
The most pernicious lies about Canadian culture—that it is fledgling, subpar, or one-note—are self-generated. A month ago, I read a 1964 short story where the late novelist Mavis Gallant describes a photo of an expat family taken on a “Canadian-looking lawn.” It takes skill to make something as dull a patch of...

View