Disquiet

Start off the work week with two fine background-music instrumental hip-hop tracks from Telephone Jim Jesus, off his late-2004 album, A Point Too Far to Astronaut (Anticon). TJJ’s “Little Boy One Eye,” which runs a romantic piano loop and genre-complementary choral effect above a disjunctive and jittery drum beat, has been featured recently on the music.download.com site, here. Over at anticon.com (click through to the “media” page), you’ll find that track, plus “Struck by Falling Object,” which is more varied, more a montage than a collage, moving from one segment (a slap of jazz horn, a heady beat, etc.) to the next, and using each snippet’s climax as the springboard to the subsequent one. And, a third treat, there’s “Blue in the Face,” which manages to bring an enthusiastic pop sensibility to CD-skipping.

By Marc Weidenbaum