Magic Nanna sounds like a character out of The Mighty Boosh, but is in fact an Austin beat music project by musician Joshua Shafer. This is some of the more playful beat stuff coming out of ATX right now, and it seems like Magic Nanna is more ’bout the bright sounds and funky electronic fun than many of his darker and more moody contemporaries in the scene. I get visions of technofairies dancing about in an LED-strewn forest when I hear Magic Nanna tracks like the excessively well-named "glitter spank" below. Given that one of Shafer’s other projects is called Wizrds Only and the Magic Nanna Facebook calls his music "electronic voodoooooo," I also get the feeling that the man wouldn’t find my enchantment-tinged description too surprising to hear. That being said, the playful electronic whines and bloops and samples in these tracks are fully rooted in hip-hop production, especially in the drums, of which Magic Nanna has an exceedingly diverse pallette he plays with. Joshua is a figure associated with many of the other major beat-scene players in Austin, like Exploded Drawing and Sole Glow Collective, and you can find not only the track below, but also a pretty impressively lengthy database of other Magic Nanna tracks and links to Joshua’s other projects (and that of his talented friends) at his Soundcloud, where he posts often.
