Download: Two Hours of Astrea Corporation Outtakes

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​It is now high time to get caught up on the major and minor works of South Florida beat conductors Astrea Corporation. The duo of Mike and Carly Astrea (their earthling names are Michael Bachman and Carly Garrett) opened up their vault of demos and outtakes last week to unveil a two-hour opus titled Disposable Orwell. It was officially a "4/20" release, but these bangers are bigger than time.

My colleague Arielle Castillo picked up on a Portishead vibe, and Mike himself calls it "space age kate bush shit." These ears hear a whole bunch of production work in the vein of science-fiction hip-hop like Dan the Automator or El-P with guitarist Frank Banisi and drummer Sandor Davidson filling out the sound. And this is just the buildup to a second album. Third String Asimov is coming!

This is the equally trippy album cover.

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Here's what Mike Astrea had to say about the leaked tracks:

ASTREA CORPORATION

DISPOSABLE ORWELL

the astrea corporation was formed a couple of years ago. my old group, BDS, had hung it up. growing weary of rapping again. my homie kiki was coming down to finish up a record we were working on at the time and to play a show. when he got down we decided to present a live instrumental set, mostly improvised, on a couple of mpcs and a laptop. we called up sandor to play drums and brought in frank banisi to play guitar.

rewind a couple of months earlier. me and carly had been dating for a while and i had always heard rumblings from family and friends that she sang. i never took much from it, probably more so, because carly convinced me it was nothing special. i came home from work one day to hear some eerie ass music bumping from my studio. opening the door i find my girl behind my gear, killing a beat and singing on top of it on some space age kate bush shit. (picks jaw up from floor).

so after this improv show, kiki goes back to cali. a west coast tour falls through. personal stife ablaze, it hit me.

form a group of your girl. bring in sandor and frank again and experiment. see what happens.

this is what happened. we banged out as many tracks as we could, just feeling out a way to mesh our styles and influences. sometimes our fuckery worked. alot of times it didn't. we put together a few half polished attempts to finish a project. played a couple train wreck shows. smoked forests in blunt form. and mastered a craft in the process.

our debut project Third String Asimov is on the horizon. and to celebrate, we open the vaults and bare our souls a bit.

enjoy,

paxitron / mike astrea

Anyhow, it's going to take a while to get a handle on these 36 tracks, which range from short sketches fresh from a videogame fantasy like "Fuckface" to a sprawling ten-plus-minute demo of "Transit Waste Authority."

Download Disposable Orwell here. Get even more jams at the Astrea Corporation's Soundcloud page.