If you go strictly by his production credits, Aesop Rock has been making beats since 2001. His first beat was the opener “Labor” on the masterpiece Labor Days. He tossed in “One of Four” as a hidden track on Daylight EP, a beat just as strong as anything his BFF Blockhead was contributing to his catalogue. Starting with Bazooka Tooth, Aes starting handling beats on the regular like algebra. His early style was a spinoff of his teachers Blockhead and El-P: futuristic funk with downtrodden basslines, b-boy drum kits thrown off the Wonder Wheel, dark but never gothic, heavy but rapper-friendly.
If it takes you ten years to master a craft, Aesop Rock is in Year Three of his Advanced Studies on Speaker Smacks. The past decade he’s produced whole projects for Felt, his own slot in the underrated Nike Run series, and his latest opus Skelethon in 2012. The Blob is his first free beat tape, a collection of ne’er do wellers that is usually reserved for tour-only CDR’s hawked for gas money.
Not every joint hits as well as his beat placements — there’s a reason The Blob is a free download. However, if Bazooka Tooth decides to turn this into a series of gems with multiple volumes, it might one day join his catalogue the same way the last two El-P MegaMixxxes deserve rank — the trash tossed by a master still eclipses the best work by mere mortals. Somewhere, there is a producer who will rise to prominence the next five years and claim Aesop Rock as one of his chief influences behind the boards, the same way Danny Brown praised the man on the mic during his ascendence.
