Get the full album for free download at dustedwax.org; there’s some beautiful echoed horn in the track “Sun Domes.” More from Third Person Lurkin, who’s based in England, at thirdpersonlurkin.bandcamp.com.

The new album turns another Jackson rifflet (a surprisingly prominent shard of “Rock with You”) into an estuary, but that’s just when it’s getting started. The collection is titled Blew Off the Burner Kinda Dusty, and its seven tracks show Kelly to be stronger than ever. Some of his earlier work emphasized ingenuity and off-kilter beats over compositional wholeness, but each of the seven tracks on Blew Off are full songs — not thoroughly conceived backing tracks awaiting a vocalist to complete them, just full songs.

The term “instrumental,” by the way, means a whole other thing in hip-hop, since a solid chunk of Kelly’s sample archive is vocal, if not verbal — vocal in factual terms, but no more or less textural and rhythmic than the rest of his source material. Perhaps the finest moment on Blew Off exemplifies this: “Swth,” which despite its Autechre-like title is a restlessly smooth affair, an endless give and take of hushed moans and rippling beats, bringing to mind some of the more subtle moments off Common’s under appreciated album Be.

The cover shows Kelly apparently blowing dust off his MPC beat machine, but if you ignore the set’s title, it’s also possible to think he’s about to give it a kiss.

Get the full set for free at arckatron.us. And I’m honored that the artist link on the album’s webpage goes directly to this interview I conducted with Kelly back in 2009: “Young Communicator.”

Small software, small experiments, small files. Mike Rotondo recently tweeted a new recording, and it turned out to be 35 seconds of beat bliss. Arguably shorter than that, given its loop-based construction — and arguably longer, given its inherent temptation to be set on loop for an extended period of time.

Titled “Flip Throw In,” it has the feel of a hip-hop production waiting for vocalists, but one secretly more than happy to keep the pace all by itself. There’s a robot heartbeat of a pulse, and what appears to be a sample of piano. Not only does the looseness of the analog piano recording align at best roughly, and therefore rewardingly, with the tensile routine of the tiny beat — so, too, does the lush low fidelity of the recording, a kind of muslin filter, pair against the beat’s pixel precision. The result is promising: a little of J Dilla’s underkey metrics, a little of Kanye West’s alchemical ability to turn sloppy into louche, a little of DJ Premier’s fetish for imperfect ivories. “Flip Throw In” was recorded in an inexpensive iOS app called iMaschine that its developer describes as a “beat sketchpad,” pictured up top. From little things, lovely little things grow.

Track originally posted at Rotondo’s soundcloud.com/treehouses account. More on iMaschine at native-instruments.com.

In a full album just out today, and available for free download only until 9:19pm (Philadelphia Time), Y?Arcka has teamed with over a dozen rappers/vocalists, including the noted rhythmic raconteur Zilla Rocca. According to a tweet Y?Arcka sent me earlier today, folks who download the album will also receive a set of the instrumental versions. Especially looking forward to hearing the instrumental of “Up My Sleeve,” its central riff something halfway between a talking drum and a flute, and of “Mr. Matic,” with its super tight mix of drums and guitar.

Album available at arckatron.bandcamp.com. Y?Arcka is on Twitter at twitter.com/whyarcka, where he bills himself as “conceptual programmer.” Read a 2009 Disquiet.com interview with Y?Arcka, born Shawn Kelly: “Young Communicator.”

The “sample seam” is generally heard as one of two things, as either a sudden gap or as a harsh truncation. It’s either a momentary pause between two common elements, as when a looped tone is intended to sound continuously but leaves a small break, or a quick cut, as when a sound is brought to an artificial close for metric and, in capable hands, rhythmic effect. (Metric would be to match the beat. Rhythmic would be to do so with artful implication.)

The “sample seam” is born of studio production, but it is not without parallel in so-called “traditional” instruments: think of the flutist taking a quick breath of air, or the guitartist’s finger resonating on the surface of a string, or the woodwind’s keys heard fluttering. Of course, those examples still depend on the presence of amplification for the effect to be heard, but that requirement just firms up the parallel between those sounds and that of the “sample seam.”

This all came to mind during several listens to Learning to Draw, a new collection by a beatcrafty musician who goes by the name Hypoetical. The standout track is its second entry, titled “Meditation,” in which a guitar loop serves as the constant element for a feat of downtempo loveliness (MP3). Also appearing are drums, bass, and a tremulous xylophone, each of those distinct parts heard as a self-conscious loop whose artificiality is essential to its delectability.

Get the full album, seven tracks total, for free download at dustedwax.org. More on Hypoetical at hypoetical.net. He was previously featured here for pairing turntablism and koto.

On “Sickle,” the individual parts of a fusion ensemble — trap drum, fuzzed-out guitar, gut-rumbling bass, light electric piano — flutter by like clips that are ever so slightly out of sync with each other (MP3). The effect is mesmerizing, and like one of Conlon Nancarrow’s famed player-piano works, challenges the primacy of human-performed music by presenting something whose very mechanical nature is an essential aspect of its rough beauty. If that is the goal of broken beat music, then “Sickle” reaches it.

And those aren’t even the finest tracks on Equilibria. That honor would arguably go to “Train” and “Oil Face,” both of which take brief snippets of existing recordings and transform them into the lead “voice” of fully considered compositions. In the case of “Train” it’s a snippet of a horn solo that appears on occasion above a bed of pizzicato plinking. It’s a dirge of a solo, each time around slowly pushing toward its conclusion. The repetition of the recorded — again: frozen — performance is in stark contrast with the emphasis in jazz on live playing, yet the affection inherent in the sampling — sampler as custodian — is undeniable (MP3).

On “Oil Face” it’s a tiny bit of a female folk vocal, heard as flittery wreckage, its verbal content unintelligible thanks to thick vinyl static and enough scratch-induced stuttering to suggest a turntable-induced stammer. When, about a minute and a quarter in, the track suddenly explodes with a pop exuberance, what’s heard is a song despite itself, a song that has managed to utterly dispense with the whole concept of lyric meaning, and still manages to combine voice and production into something elevating and intoxicating (MP3).

It’s only June as I type this, but if Equilibria isn’t on my best-of-2011 list it’s only because some seriously tremendous music arrives between now and the end of the year.

Get the full album, 11 tracks in all, for free download at dustedwax.org. More on Dustmotes/Crocker at dustmotes.net.

Japan-based Yoshiteru Himuro has been posting a series of “free beats” on his soundcloud.com/himuro-yoshiteru account. The latest, unceremoniously titled “Free Beats Log Day3,” features a deliriously sloggy rhythm, layers of jittery pecussives, snippets of truncated hollahs, and a memorably little chiptune melody. The strongest of its many strong suits is the way it is shot through with momentary asides, those sudden split-second fissures that serve as instrumental hip-hop’s nanotech vision of that traditional songwriting component, the bridge.

This isn’t short-attention-span hip-hop, by any means. The overall piece proceeds willfully. The interactions merely lend drama. Their insinuation of chance fulfills the promise of the underlying beat, taking its fractured cadence and letting it manifest as occasional chunks of fully formed distraction.

The beat is, all in all, a thorough concoction, and comes highly recommended. Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/himuro-yoshiteru. More on Himuro at himuro-yoshiteru.blogspot.com.

The first few times through the track, that opening static seems associated with the lifted source material, but by the fourth or fifth listen, the track has become so solidly Mahoney’s own that the static instead comes to suggest itself merely as the sound of a song about to begin after the needle has touched down.

Nick Lowe once sang, “This rut I am in, it once was a groove.” What beatmakers like Mahoney do is to try to find a new groove in that old rut. And the beauty of the retained static is they take pleasure in that very rut-ness.

Album available at dustedwax.org. Mahoney is based in the UK. More on him at anthonymahoney.blogspot.com and twitter.com/tonyberlusconi.
This post is doing double duty as a test of a new audio player. If you have any trouble accessing the track, please let me know. Thanks.

Get the full release, for free, at dustedwax.org and at archive.org.

More on Skipless, who is from Ikaalinen, Finland, where he says he works solely from vinyl and an MPC, at skipless.com.

More on Eufoteoria, aka Poland-based Amadeusz Szczerbowski, at myspace.com/eufoteoria.