Can’t guarantee this will be too regular, because it depends on whether there’s enough new good shit I caught. But there was a gang on lately.
Child Actor x August Fanon :: Here and Here
Two very different producers, but both who are accelerating as the chef’s kiss go-tos in the underground scene—like what Daringer and Conductor Williams have been for Griselda types, seeing these cats’ names on a tracklist makes you salivate.
Child Actor’s been on the rise for about five years with his joints for Armand Hammer/woods/ELUCID, Serengeti, Akai Solo, Open Mike Eagle, Ceschi and partnering with Cavalier, among others. August Fanon has been out there forever, but only recently getting his propers for being such a monster: he was doing peerless Mach-Hommy tracks almost ten years ago, and done collab albums with select underground cats like Iceberg Theory, Tokyo Cigar and Defcee, on top of a slew of beat tapes and choice slots.
Child Actor’s tracks are more hazy, dreamy and intricate; Fanon’s are harder stabbing, funkier, with his signature horn loops and basslines, and long political samples. This massive tasting menu of 35 tracks runs to short snippets, loops, sketches — but rather than feeling fragmentary, it’s more confidently minimalist: here’s the essential construction, the core element, you don’t need to hear it run on for three or four minutes. It’s the difference between a massive Grand Slam Breakfast and one of those fancy Michelin star tasting menus where you’re served a single poached frog egg on a bed of tarragon foam, then a nest woven from smoked rosemary leaves with a 1/16th teaspoon of gelled boar broth, etc. for two hours. OK now I’m hungry.
Damon Locks :: List of Demands
Somewhere between spoken word, free jazz, soundscape, multimedia performance/art installation now showing in the gallery between your ears. It’s a beautiful, funky and complex textual/musical collage.
More and more I find there is less and less directly political music, despite the times — and more and more defiantly political music that is making larger, higher, greater demands. Injustice, degradation and oppression has risen in a fever wave, becoming so universal and enveloping just marching with one placard, one slogan, one issue isn’t going to cut it. Did you really think Kendrick was gonna bring YG onstage at the Superbowl to do “FDT”? Do you really think it would have changed anything?
And so the stakes for artists like Locks and Moor Mother have risen in parallel: beyond an end to state violence, exploitation and discrimination, and calling for underground spiritual railroads, artistic and aesthetic protests, poetic mass movements.
I feel this type of work is a reaction to political exhaustion, despair and disillusionment with any group, party, ideology; that artists feel the revolution won’t even be televised, it won’t even get a hashtag or an obscure TikTok with 2 views. The idea is that everyone must free themselves, individually, protect themselves, and at best share their methodology and mental riot helmet and musical Molotov recipe on subversive, stealthy works where the message is coded, woven into the music.
Doseone x Steel Tipped Dove :: All Portrait, No Chorus
A lot of younger cats don’t know from Doseone, the Jello Biafra of the Anticon scene. And maybe don’t know from Anticon, which ran in parallel on the West Coast to Def Jux on the same turn-hip-hop-upside-down-and-shake-it-loose, quantum leap forward to the entire 2K millenium. Except the Anticon crew ate more mescaline and read more J.G. Ballard, or something.
I like Dose better when he’s doing his growly lowdown voice than his Rammellzee/B-Real/Gangsta Duck voice, but man, he hasn’t lost a step in all these years, sounds leaner than ever. And for a guy called Steel Tipped Dove, the beats are rusty, blunted, dirty and crawling through the swamp.
ELUCID :: INTERFERENCE PATTERN
There are pockets in ELUCID’s discography, divots and dips, where he’s taken a breath between capital-a-Albums to sketch and experiment, the artist at play: Osage, Horse Latitude, Seership, Every Egg, BRB…tucked in them are loosies, rarities, secreted deep cuts like they’ve been Edgar Allan Poe’d behind a brick wall. Verses wander in and wander out like loved ones at your fever sickbed, like visitations, chance encounters.
Like I said when serpentining through his discography, these are crucial meditations and soul cleansing journeys he consistently revisits. They’re sketchbooks, blueprints for future work, diaries, collages, Joseph Cornell boxes. Musically they fall into what Mars Kumari in an interview with Roy Christopher recently called ‘hauntology,’ broad brush strokes of drone, ambient, shimmer and glow.
It’s a big mistake though to count these as one-offs, leftovers, mixtapes or palate cleansers between the ‘real’ works though. Each of them is vital and crafted, uninterrupted extended travelogues of the Cities of the Red Night.
Messiah Muzik :: Wurlitzer
He is the Messiah, and he’s also a very naughty boy, dropping this rich selection of twenty-one moody, subtle beats on us without warning, like getting a horn-laden cornucopia dumped over your head. It’s like a tasting menu for MCs, just one more beat sir, it’s waffer-thin…
YETI MANE :: American Classical Studies
For a long time I was putting together mixes of jazz/hip hop intersections that had no noodly, fedora-wearing type shit, strictly be-bop for b-boys (there’s ten of these on that Mixcloud). It’s still one of my favorite sub-sub-genres of instrumentals, but either I stopped catching ’em or cats aren’t vibing them as much anymore? Whatever, because here you have a straight set bringing it back to the Village Vanguard in 1965, by way of old school sampling.
You’re All Cowards :: s/t
A triple tag team instrumental joint by Q no rap name, Chop the Head x six†een that’s a mean Zero Dark Thirty (actually there’s 27 tracks but you can run back your three favorites twice). Been a while since I caught something new in this vein I really dug. Recommended if you like deep beats, beat deeps, dark ambient, Darth Ambien, falling down a hole and staying there, drunk driving at night with your eyes closed.
Bill Orcutt :: Music For Four Guitars / Bill Orcutt x Chris Corsano x Zoh Amba :: The Flower School / Bill Orcutt :: The Four Louies
In the non-hip-hop realm of things, I went through most of the long, deep and varied discography of this dude…really an incredible and restless talent. I particularly dug Four Guitars, which is kinda like: what if Ry Cooder was in Sonic Youth?
The Flower School is an off the hook, off the chain, off the rails free jazz jam that’s as much The Stooges as Ornette Coleman. The Four Louies is totally bugged out: “Louie Louie” deconstructed, just that earworm riff, over and over and over and over, it’s Philip Glass’ original soundtrack to David Lynch’s Back To The Future, it’s William Basinski’s Disintegrated Kingsmen.
Got more on deck bringing the pain with Infinity Knives x Brian Ennals, Henry Canyons x Fresh Kils, and who knows what else, what am I, cub reporter Jimmy fucking Olsen with the hot inside scoop?
