You already know by now. The 12th installment of the LET podcast eschews Dirty Dozen clips for Shlohmo’s decision to sample the hell out of Half Baked. Contemporary jeep music. The other half is manned by D-Styles, who brews a head-bobbing blend of Project Pat, “Welcome to Jamrock,” M.I.A., and dubstep remixes of “Hip-Hop.” We even get Jimmy Van and Richard Hieronymous’s “I Weigh With Kilo’s,” which prominent Starksologists may recall. For those too young to recognize Dave Cuasito from the days when he owned Web 1.0 turntablism message boards, if he ain’t better than Q-Bert, he’s the closest one — another reason why this might be only podcast I will ever subscribe to. All apologies to Ira Glass.
In nearly five years of blogging, the number of bands I’ve written about following unsolicited submissions hovers at a rate of approximately one a year. Pollyn, a local dream-pop three-piece, is the exception. For those shopping your demos in overheated cars, here’s how they beat the odds. First of all, it helps when your producer/”sound creator,” Adam Jay Weissman has written songs for UNKLE and produced for Guilty Simpson and Masta Ace (of course, it doesn’t hurt when you have a “Weiss” in your name). Second, you aren’t a hip-hop group but you go to the guy who mixed the Jaylib record to do the honors for your official debut. Third, you front artists like Hot Chip, Nosaj Thing, and Matthew Herbert among the top friends on your Myspace, which doesn’t mean shit per se, but at least means that you have good taste and aren’t some screamo band from Bakersfield who randomly pulled my e-mail address out of a stack of thousands.
When it comes down to putting out a remix album, you avoid the guy who floods my inbox every week bragging “YO HOMIE, CHECK THIS SHIT OUT, I MIXED UP NOTORIOUS BIG WITH PANDA BEAR. I CALL IT NOTORIOUS P.A.N.D.A.” Instead, you enlist white-hot wonky producers like Blue Daisy and dEbruit to morph your Portishead on lithium atmospherics into something relentlessly funky but still eerie and fresh (I’m re-engineering this back into my lexicon, deal.) Most importantly, you’ve got to be good. And in addition to boasting my favorite self-coined nickname for kush, Pollyn are all of these things. Of course, comparing a band to Portishead is a slippery slope, so for the sake of the comment brigade, let’s reference them to Asobi Seksu, if they pulled from hip-hop and beat music as much as they did The Cocteau Twins. Already a KCRW darling, Pollyn get the co-sign from both Sunset Dr. and 1974 Broadway. Listen to their demo or their album.
Let’s be honest, a significant portion of the purple/wonky/whatever tunes–even the exceptional ones–lack personality. Enter Rudi Zygadlo, yet another of the Scottish-bred beat contingent, who have spent the last year and change convincing the seven Americans paying attention that Glasgow is far more than the sum of Belle & Sebastian, Franz Ferdinand, and cheap stereotypes involving Groundskeeper Willie and his retirement grease. Like Mike Slott, Hudson Mohawke, and Rustie, Zygadlo operates at the hazy intersection of hip-hop and dubstep, and despite the reductive simplifications they’ve engendered, like anything truly creative, their styles are singular.
Inspired by classical, church liturgies, opera, folk, Zappa, and early ’00s early hip-hop, Zygaldo’s music stands out from his peers for his eclecticism and deep devotion to song-craft, boasting well-constructed hooks, bridges, and breakdowns. Calling these “beats” does them a grave disservice, with their brain-frying synths, ruthless groove, and symphonic inclinations most closely resembling Guido and Nosaj Thing. Hearing Zygadlo on a Mary Anne Hobbs’ BBC1 mix for the first time, engendered a stop-whatever-it-is-that-you’re-doing epiphany, one that immediately made me want to know more about the man who will soon be eliciting a spate of bad “Rudi Can’t Fail” headlines. A Google search brought back little information other than mentioning that he used to play in an indie-rock group called The Velcro Quartet. Thus, this interview needed to happen. Zygaldo’s first full-length, Great Western Laymen, drops in April on Planet Mu. If it’s anywhere as good as the singles and remixes (everything from Hot Chip to “White Lines”) collected on the Hobbs mix he dropped last month, it promises to be one of the year’s most memorable debuts, even better than “The Shinning.”
There’s something terribly incongruous about following up a post on Lil Boosie with something called “La Mixette.” To say nothing of the fact it is on a label called Musique Large. I understand that Louisiana has deep French roots, but something tells me that this would not be the soundtrack for Torrence Hatch’s dalliances with dark stars and ecstasy pills. Though the mix does blend nicely in the minds of violet-colored kush aficionados (so says Gallup), featuring gauzy blunted beats from the likes of Brainfeeders Teebs, Lorn, and Samiyam. Plus, Dr. Who Dat (Janeiro Jarel), Madlib, and Low Limit.
Not much is known about the Parisian mixers behind it all. According to their label, “you don’t know this [sic] two guys and we prefer to let u discover their likes by your own..Concepcion Perez & Baron Retif are from Paris, they record their songs into a secret cave, tracks by tracks, in the oldschool way and you will hear more from them soon, as they will be signed on Musique Large…stay tuned.” Whatever. Either way, Frenchmen with maladroit grammar who inadvertently name themselves after members of the Big Red Machine infield, equals funny every single time. It’s also nice to know that they don’t like Joe Morgan either. Get your weekend started right, tracklist after the jump, etc.
With CD sales about as robust as the typewriter industry, it’s little secret that labels have had to get wiser about packaging and promo to entice customers to shill out $15 for a piece of plastic that they can readily pirate. So credit Bleep, the digital arm of Warp Records for their ambitious North/South/East/West Project, in which they’ve collaborated with photographer Shaun Bloodworth and designer Stuart Hammersley, of Give Up Art, to create “an audio visual document taking a snapshot in time across four different regions of the world - North and South UK and East and West coast USA.”
They’ve created an embeddable player allowing you to stream tracks and peruse photos from the estimable roster they’ve collected: Flying Lotus, Matthew David, and Daedelus repping LA; Skream, Headhunter, and Geenus in London/Bristol; Hudson Mohawke, Rustie, and Taz Buckfaster in Glasgow; and Mike Slott, Fatty DL, and Kotchy from NYC. More product info available below the jump. I haven’t seen it the finished product yet, but I will say that it has the potential to be as good as the “Tootsie Roll.”
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Scottish bred bass music prodigy Rustie may or may not sleep. After all, when I was 21, I could subsist on a Lamar Odom diet of skittles and sour patch kids, three hours of sleep, and a half pack of Parliaments. But Rustie may or may not be 21. According to his bio, “Rustie is older than he looks. Rustie makes beats and is a muthafukin bowss. Rustie wrote that himself.” He also described the picture above as “getting bufffff…beefcake BEEFCAKE!!!!” Off humor alone, the guy might be my favorite within Glasgow’s ballyhooed beatmaker scene that includes Hudson Mohawke and Mike Slott.
While Rustie has a forthcoming Warp debut slated to drop at the top of the year, he took time to tweak a Keisha Cole track into an interstellar post-Timbaland odyssey, a la Hudson Mohawke’s flip of Tweet. The sort of thing that sends writers into hack descriptions of space suits with intergalactic orchestras, soulstresses, and the occasionally slutty robot. I’ll spare y’all, lest I reveal too much about the world of lascivious androids–after all, this isn’t Tank Girl. Because I am feeling charitable this afternoon, I’m also throwing in the mix that Rustie did earlier this year for Mary Anne Hobbs and his heavily hip-hop skewing Fact blend that is excellent save for the presence of Ace Hood, who is neither very ace nor very hood. Talk amongst yourselves.
Not that I’ve had to choose, but I’ve generally preferred Dubstep’s half-speed syncopation and violent bass drops to Future/instrumental Hip-Hop’s 3-minute stoner grooves this year. That said, I’ll gladly make an exception for Paul White’sSounds from the Skylight, whose ever-so-brief first side dropped last week, threatening to wreck havoc on my end of the year list. Sounding as massive as anything produced by Hudson Mohawke, but filling the space between the cavernous drums with a mix of off-kilter sampling, melodic keys and a funky sense of rhythm, White’s music is made for rocking out. Tunes start at full blast, accelerate for two minutes (or less!) and vanish just as quickly, powered by the kind of propulsive head-nod inducing energy I gravitate towards to in electronic music.
As we exit the decade, it’s becoming increasingly clear that J Dilla is rap’s Obi Wan Kenobi: a grandmaster in his own time but more powerful than we could ever imagine in the afterlife. From Stone Throw’s Lo-fidelity grooves to the ever-evolving Alpha-Pup/Brainfeeder/Low-End Theory axis to the attics of London and basements of Detroit, Donuts has become the decade’s least-likely touchstone, freeing producers from outdated notions of structure while promoting musical ideas that have proven adaptable to a multitude of styles. While Paul White has the respect not to use James Yancey’s name in vain (who let Charles Hamilton out of his crawlspace anyways?), there’s no doubt that Detroit’s finest heavily influenced Sounds from the Skylight, an exciting album from a producer who could make some serious noise in 2010.
If Dibiase does not win the title of best beatmaker in Los Angeles, he will buy it from a thespian giant named Andre who may or may not hail from Grenoble France. As this is a tough belt to win, I hope he is saving his diamonds and gold bullion. Unlike the Million Dollar Man, the Watts-born beatmaker understands the value of paying dues, as he’s bounced around for over a decade, honing his craft at Blowed, Unity, and Sketch, the forerunner to the Low End Theory. Of late, he’s finally said his prayers and taken his vitamins, with Alpha Pup set to release his debut LP soon, on the heels of a Low End performance this summer that hit me like a folding chair over the head (no referees).
Like everyone else affiliated with the beat scene, you can trace his sound through the usual suspects: Madlib and Dilla, Primo and Pete Rock, et. al. But Dibiase’s love of old-skool Nintendo is rivaled only by the Bristol producers, as he’s recently flipped RC Pro-Am, Castlevania, and Mega Man 3 with ease. I remain patient to hear the re-constituted versions of Baseball Stars and Tecmo Bowl–perhaps tonight when the erstwhile Diabolic takes over the Hyperion Tavern, which some knucklehead recently claimed hosts the best weekend electronic beats in town. Also playing is Dak, who records for Matthew David’s Leaving Records imprint, and provides conclusive evidence that either the depth of local talent is limitless, or I have smoked myself retarded. Maybe both.
YouTube videos of both Dibiase’s below the jump, complete with Bobby the Brain and Gorilla Monsoon’s Manichean dialectic. The World Wrestling Federation was deep.
After years of blogging, you’d think I’d learn my lesson and not invoke grandiose posts that traffic, migraines, and malingering conspire to prevent me from writing. But despite the linguistic similarity to my surname, I am not wise. So perhaps something on Attention Deficit tomorrow, perhaps not. In the meantime, a fulfilled promise alluded to two weeks ago: a long-form feature on Jason Chung, a.k.a. Nosaj Thing, a.k.a. the best thing from Cerritos since Cerritos Auto Square. (RIP Big Ern)
The article is my first for Resident Adviser, the dance and electronic music magazine extraordinaire. For those chagrined that Stylus is no more, Todd Burns, ex-chairman of the Sty, currently runs RA and has reunited many of my former colleagues. It is very much worth adding to your RSS feed– if you’re into that sort of thing. In the interim, more Nosaj rarities. Know what I mean.
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