This bi-monthly LIVE radio show on Radio Free Brooklyn hosted by NYC's Killy "Mock$tar" Dwyer is a tasty treat for your ear holes. Mock-U-Mental is served up with a healthy dose of live jams and interviews, topped with listener questions, comments, requests and prank calls, paired with a feel good, mock bottom drinking game. Come play along with Killy, her enigmatic husband Craig Schober, her dog Monkey, and featuring Timothy Dark and Kelsey Warren/ Blak Emoji
Listen here to the LIVE show every other Friday 8-10pm http://radiofreebrooklyn.com/show/mock-u-mental.
AND CALL IN AT 718-928-9RFB (9732) any time during the show to ask a question or make a comment!
About our guests:
Kelsey Warren has been around the block, having fronted a long-running and successful rock band based on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. But Blak Emoji, the current face of Kelsey Warren, is something entirely different and new--both for Warren himself and for the listener weary of monotonous music trends.
Warren is capable of plenty: He studied jazz guitar, classical voice and music theory at the University of Miami, and has played and sung in every possible context, as leader, sideman and hired gun around New York City. Blak Emoji is where he puts it all together for himself, mixing his tendencies as a brainy, substantive and complex writer with a fixation on synth sounds.
Blak Emoji songs are rarely simple and compact, but neither are they droning and repetitive like so much contemporary electronic music. One might fit in at the club, another as a morning pump-up song in your earbuds on the way to work or class, another as a bedroom jam, but as as rule they pack complexity without forcing it. The common denominator is Warren’s effortless vocals, which might closest recall Seal. Whether over electroboogie-inspired dance music or a sweet ballad, Warren’s smooth voice makes every track pop perfection.
Joined by bass/synth player Bryan Percivall, drummer Max Tholenaar-Maples and keyboardist Sylvana Joyce, Warren has made Blak Emoji his focus as a musician, tying together his longtime interest in alt-rock (think Nine Inch Nails, Bjork) with a more recently kindled romance with dance beats.
Blak Emoji, which Warren began late 2015, released its debut EP, INTRO on January 20, 2017. It’s likely to be music the like of which you haven’t heard in some time, if ever -- and that’s precisely how Blak Emoji wants it.
Timothy Dark
In a painful five-year stretch, New York-based rapper and performer Timothy Dark lost his mother, godmother, father, beloved dog, his home, and lost his job to Hurricane Sandy. The one thing he had left was his music—that’s what got him through those truly dark times. Now, he emerges soulfully triumphant with his latest opus, The Last Days Of Dark, a milestone album of healing through bravely confronting heartache.
“When friends and family heard the title, they were like, ‘Are you dying?,’” Timothy recalls with a hearty laugh. “Some days it felt like I was, but the music was my therapy. It taught me to live each day as if it was my last. Even in the worst of times, remember you have life—don’t waste your time wallowing in sorrow.”
Dark's expansive artistry encompasses politically charged hip-hop, buttery R&B, grimy rock, street savvy poetry, literature, non-dogmatic spirituality, and singer-songwriter style emotional intimacy. The main protagonist throughout his wildly eclectic six-album catalog is a Dark Warrior alter ego beamed down to earth to share a platform of enlightenment, raw truths, love, music, and political revolution. He also uses his fluid creativity to inhabit ancillary alter egos to deeply express the full range of his emotions through his musicality. These all come together in an artistic dynamic he calls “constant harmonious” conflict. His latest album is a profound panoramic of these perspectives and genres with a crisp and modern production aesthetic.
“All these different voices a(continued)
