Another lovely beat-and-haze piece by Patrick Ellis. Like the one written up here earlier this month, “Sheffield Park” bears the “ambient hip-hop” tag. It’s more hip-hop than ambient this time around, flipping the emphasis from the earlier track, what with its more prominent beat, and more varied sectioning (despite being shy of a mere four minutes, it could qualify as a mini-suite). There are distant church bells, and a swaggering rhythm, and a lush hovering spaciousness, as well as, toward the end, what appears to be a quote from the book The Unicorn Trade by science fiction legend Poul Anderson and his wife Karen Anderson: “They talked quietly, until at last Gus reminded them that even here they were not masters of time. Eternity, yes, but not time,” the last word echoing and fading into the instrumental foundation.
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/patrick. Ellis is based in Seattle, Washington.
William Gibson’s oft-quoted maxim “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed” is an Internet-age corollary to perhaps the most cited line by William Faulkner, Gibson’s fellow novelist born in the American south. The Faulkner line: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Both statements come to mind regularly when something from the great netlabel Dusted Wax Kingdom is spinning. Dusted Wax regularly posts music from the former Soviet Union, and related countries, that sounds like it was recorded in the Bronx shortly after the fall of the Berlin wall. The majority of Dusted Wax’s music is instrumental hip-hop, voiceless lines of artfully shambling beats. The beats may benefit from digital tools, but they bear all the marks of oldest-school hip-hop: vinyl surface noise, lightly reconfigured samples, a menacingly sedate pace. Among the latest from Dusted Wax is Urban Soul from “Russian beatsmith” Bruks Production, based out of Moscow. Among its key tracks is “Latin Thugs,” its brief horn sample echoed above slow rolling percussion (
