Rafter eats healthy, dances regularly, and has been known to rescue a wayward animal or two.  In other words, he is a super hero with a penchant for groovy dancing.  Hollywood producers took notice and have asked him to provide some party music for the second episode of Adrian Grenier’s (of HBO’s Entourage fame) Alter Eco show.  This episode will premiere TONIGHT! (then likely rerun,) on Planet Green.  The episode features seminal graphic artist and designer Shepard Fairey.  Their website has a channel tracker so people can find it in their area.

http://planetgreen.discovery.com/tv/

If you’re at all a visitor to our fine webhome, you know that for a while Rafter was posting weekly mp3s. Well-received all, but it occurred to Rafter that the best of them made a fine booty moving mix. Rafter trenched up in his studio, took these self-made tracks and added that special, loving spin to each song that only Rafter can.

The result is the Sweaty Magic EP, a perfectly designed set of seven songs with the sole intent of expanding the borders of the dance floor further and further out. We’ve had the luxury to listen to the EP, and the result was exactly as promised: sweaty, and magical. These little  musical gems will arrive just as the summer winds up, on September 9, just before you wipe that brow for the last time.

Rafter’s latest work, Sex Death Cassette, made its own tour around the magazines, nearly all of whom absolutely loved the jaunt of this jingle-producer-cum rockstar. His shows are parties in stage size, and boy can Rafter funk it good. Short and sweet is his moniker, so he’ll be touring like a bee in spring with sweet, sweet honey to get from here to there, from San Fran to Portland and a few places along the way, then back again. He’s touring with the fantastic Dirty Projectors and No Kids for a few of the shows.

If all of us here at AK lived on the West Coast here at Asthmatic Kitty, we’d be at every show of Rafter’s. Not to be missed!

Surprise Bonus Time Surprise!! Rafter has compiled a list of his favorite riffs, and Rhapsody is kind enough to host them. Click here to listen.

This is it. Sex Death Cassette is flying hot out of the Rafter oven, and landing toasty and delicious on the shelves of your local independent record store and our own online store. Rafter has certainly proliferated his share of music lately, not the least of which includes two albums (10 Songs and Music for Total Chickens), a Song a Week for the last 16 weeks (click here to listen), and more recently, a deliciously talkboxed tune for Pepper Mill Records (here for page, here for MP3).

But here’s the weird thing: this sheer volume has just made Rafter sound better and better, and Sex Death Cassette is the culmination. Paper Thin Walls is hosting a full, free stream of the album alongside Rafter’s commentary if you’d like to hear it for yourself. Click here, and be sure to comment! You can buy it from us for $10 (+S&H) by clicking here.

Rafter’s first official full-length release, Music for Total Chickens, inspired many things, not the least of which was a car chase in a forest with eggs. But one album isn’t enough to contain the imagination of Rafter.

So, on January 22nd when you think you’re done with partying in 2008, Rafter will release his second record, Sex Death Cassette, an album that will change the way you think about television and move your boot(y) – in just 19 songs or less! Like cough syrup on a stomach full of hi-qual sushi, this album will go smooth and sweet. We already have one song up from the album, so start sampling by clicking here.

But even two full-lengths is not enough to contain the pure awesomeness of Rafter. Here on our very own Sidebar, Rafter is releasing a song a week. He’s already three in, so you have some catching up to do. Click here to see the entries so far.

  "ZZZPenchant" (Download)

Back in March, Rafter and whatever bandmates he could find (Chris Cory, Susanna Waiche, Ryan Severance, Future Rapper, and John Beeler) went into a borrowed studio to record some songs for the veritable Daytrotter, who has just posted them to their website. It’s now several months later, but the songs sound just as fresh. In fact, they’re so new that some of the tracks are from an album due out later this year! Others are from Music for Total Chickens – and Daytrotter recorded all with amazing skill and sound quality.

Click here to read Sean Moeller’s writeup, here to stream and download the mp3s, or here for a list of previous Asthmatic Kitty artists on Daytrotter.

Just over two weeks ago, we particpated in the great experiment that was the Rafter Half-Week of Love. To celebrate the release of his Music for Total Chickens, and St. Valentine’s Day, we posted some kind of content each day, be it a song, video, or sidebar. Lost At Sea Magazine even interviewed him!

The half-week ended – too quickly, as half-weeks often do – but that doesn’t mean Rafter has stopped his loving!  He sent this sidebar that is half invitation, half exhortation, treatise, and all love! Love on, Rafter.  Love on.

Master remixer David Stith, available via the web and MySpace, recently contributed a haunting remix to My Brightest Diamond’s Tear it Down. But he couldn’t resist adding to the Half-Week of Rafter Love with his own poppy rendition of  the Music for Total Chickens track "merchandise." Download the mp3 here. Thanks for the Rafter Love, David!

We have had this little old virtual web radio sitting around for a while. We call it AKRadio. Behind the scenes, we’ve been quietly soliciting tracks from our artists, getting a live cut here and a b-side there, slowly building a library of interesting sounds to broadcast over these virtual airwaves we call Internet. 

Since it is The Rafter Half-Week of Love, and we realized we should launch AKRadio before the World Wide Web moves to holo-mp3s and leaves us in the lonely dust of obsolescence, we figured we should probably launch this. We asked Rafter if he had anything sitting around. Of course he did, gifting us with some rare tracks he recorded in 1997.  That’s ten years ago.  Besides, it’s Casual Friday out there on the cubicle front, and that means lots of good people need a little something to get them through the day.

You can access AKRadio by clicking on the the link at the top there, just beneath our banner. We’re starting with some Rafter tracks, but we will rotate out and add new tracks from other artists later on. Until then, enjoy the streaming Rafter goodness!

As we mentioned before, we would like to showcase some of our favorite entries for the Music For Total Chickens video contest. Here is one by chussell.