Re-Extra-extra: this is a new update but I’m leaving the call for submissions up here. So don’t trip and read below, party people.

Call for submissions! I’m starting to plan a North American tour in February to promote the release of my DVD. I’m looking for somebody to do visuals on this tour. Obviously this would entail being on the road, I’d say for a good 3-4 weeks. And I’m looking for someone who understands the aesthetic that I’ve been working with in my projects so far, who has experience doing visuals for live shows and who can bring lots of creativity to the show. Please email me your submissions (info@djatrak.com). Thanks.

And now, back to our bidness. First of all, I know it’s been a minute since the last minute. You’ll have to excuse me — the Kanye tour starts tomorrow and it’s been pretty insane in the last couple of weeks, trying to get ready and finish a bunch of work before hitting the road. I’m really excited though.

For the first year that I worked with Kanye, we never rehearsed and our shows were pretty straight-forward, in the sense that we didn’t change up the songs that much. But lately we’ve been performing with a string section, and for the tour we also have Karriem Riggins playing percussions, Omar on the keyboards, and Tony Williams and Joy Campbell as backup singers. What’s cool is, we’re now able to flip the songs a lot more, do breakdowns and change-ups and transitions, all that good stuff. In a sense, having a couple of musicians around allows me to do more because it makes us all more flexible. For example we did this show at Abbey Road studios in London, on Sept 21st, with the string section. Adam Levine wasn’t there but John Legend was. When we did “Head Em Say”, it was just John Legend playing the piano part, accompanied by the strings. No beat. And in the chorus I would scratch in Adam’s acapella on Serato. Then at the last chorus I brought in the drums on the other turntable while still cutting Adam’s part. It came out great!

The next day we flew to New York for the VH1 Hip Hop Honors taping (it aired a few days later). For the past couple of days we were so focused on preparing the Abbey Road show that we didn’t really know what the VH1 thing was gonna be about. We showed up and were like “hey wait, this is big!”. After it aired a lot people asked me what it was like being there, but the reality is, we had just landed and we didn’t even get to see the event! I just saw the rerun for the first time the other day. And then the craziest TV performance was Saturday Night Live last week! I haven’t even seen it yet, but that whole day I was just thinking “SNL? Are you serious?”… So I’ve been having a ball.

Meanwhile, we pressed up a limited run of white-labels for my Dipset song, “Don’t Fool With The Dips”. Catch them while you can! And I also want to plug this new CD called “It’s The Motherfucking Remix Vol.2″, by The Rub DJs and friends. That’s my homies DJ Ayres and Cosmo Baker from New York. I did 2 remixes on there, plus the intro, so check it out! You can go to www.itstherub.com for more info.

Consequence has a new single out called “Caught Up In The Hype”, produced by Nottz, and I did the cuts on it. You can also peep his new mixtape “The Cons Vol.3″ — I scratched on this song called “Do What You Do”, produced by Sa-Ra. And I’m putting the finishing touches on my mixtape with GLC, called “Drive Slow”. I’ll put up more info in the very near future…

So umm… I lost my camera recently so I don’t have that many new pictures this time. This first one is pretty special though: this is my homie DJ Devious from Montreal — he’s the first DJ I ever linked up with, back when I was 14. You’ll see him on my DVD. He just sent me this old picture of him and me… classic!

And these 2 are pretty self-explanatory.

I’ll write back in a couple of days with news from the tour! Here we go again…