The influence of the late hip-hop producer J Dilla feels, at times, insurmountable. In death (he passed five years ago this month), Dilla reached a place in the pop consciousness that, at least in hip-hop terms, only rappers usually achieve: the level of cultural icon, where work and image and biography and myth collide.
An edifice that tall casts a shadow wide and long. If you spend any time listening in on the beat-battle message boards, where striving producers and bedroom beatcrafters share their efforts, it’s clear that his influence is as strong if not stronger than that of his peers, folks like Timblaland, the Neptunes, Swiss Beatz, Alchemist, and so on.
Philadelphia’s Shawn Kelly, aka Arckatron, aka WhyArcka, a fairly constant presence on this site, has never been shy about his affection for Dilla. Few if any producers are. They drop his name almost as often as they do his samples. Over the past few years, Kelly has developed a set of beats for Dilla tribute performance, and he’s uploaded the prepared material to his soundcloud.com/arckatron space. Ever fully conscious of what he is up to — Kelly is a remarkable presence in production, with a keen ear for mico-moments of songs, which he shapes into original compositions that are like side-view holograms of the original — he has titled the work, explicitly, “Gettin’ Dilla Out My System.” By reproducing and messing with the work of a prominent cultural predecessor, he enacts in real time the functional process of absorbing and dispensing with influence.
If Arcka’s goal truly is to rid himself of the anxiety of influence, you can say he starts making headway around the five-minute mark (technically the 15-minute mark, because this is the second of two sets of eight beats each, and the first track, also at soundcloud.com/arckatron, is 10 minutes long). That’s when his trademark cut-up, a splinter stutter that’s hip-hop’s answer to granular synthesis, starts to make itself heard.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/arckatron. Above photo of Kelly performing is a detail of a still from concert footage of him at vimeo.com.
Week 205 of the Stones Throw Beat Battles involved a bit of what appears to be Turkish music, a woman’s voice heard over flanging sitar and rattly percussion. In the hands of the Beat Battles crew, those raw materials experience a sonic diaspora, headed every which way. By a rough count, 50 or more different tracks built from the same shared source material were uploaded — presumably each by a different producer.
The first rule of the Beat Battles is “flip the chosen sample any way you want,” which happens here, ranging from pop-ready technofied hip-hop, to old-school afternoon funk by J Dilla acolytes, to some seriously out sounds. It was the late Dilla’s birthday (February 7) that this particular week’s battle coincided with, and today, February 10, is the fifth anniversary of his death, but his influence would have been heard no matter what the calendar read. He hovers over a substantial number of submissions every week.
There’s a special pleasure to just listening to one remix after another, each snagging different parts of the original — a drum sound here, a peculiar inaccuracy in the vocal here, a tiny rifflet there — and making new wholes from them. Here are a handful of favorites from the week 205 bunch:
Thingkyng‘s is something of a suite, opening with warbly, reverse-time samples, moving into a stuttered vocal snippet. It may make better use of the voice than any of the other entries:
The track by uPprhand is the most blatant in its affection for Dilla, who is named repeatedly against a bleat beat that gets sliced with tiny little vocal bits, those narrow moments jutting in like stray memories. It’s a great effect put to good use:
While its stroboscopic back’n'forth can be a bit hard on one’s sense of orientation,a heavy thump of a beat centers everything on G.HahD‘s entry, along with ghostly vocals and a distant wood block:
“205″ by Jondis has the most swing of the bunch, a loping swell that has your head bouncing side to side, using the original material in a manner that may be familiar in its structure but that rejuvenates the form by dropping in unlikely sample selections:
With its echoes of Wagon Christ and Funki Porcini and DJ Krush and Kid Koala, Pendulum by San Jose, California-based Hypoetical builds old-school hip-hop beats from hazy fragments of melodramatic found sounds — an association Hypoetical engages with directly by titling the album’s 21st and final track, a three-minute rhapsody for thumping beat and a handful of piano notes, “Elevator Music” (MP3). Reissued recently online for free download by the great dustedwax.org netlabel, the album dates from 2001. Its best tracks, like “Elevator Music,” keep their source material relatively unmolested. “A Turntable and a Koto Record” (MP3) sounds like pretty much exactly that, though the koto’s strings are heard to make curt, terse repetitions, much like those in “Elevator Music,” that the instrument never would in its traditional setting. Likewise the murkily orchestral “The War Within” (MP3), which makes much of a briefly bowed cello. Other favorites include the eerie children’s melody of “Staring at My Eyelids” (MP3), the romantic whorl that is “Reminds Me of Dennis” (MP3), and the overtly cinematic “Flow Job” (MP3).
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Get the full set of 21 tracks at dustedwax.org. If this weren’t already a decade old, much of it would be on my “likely” list for best netlabel releases of 2011. More on Hypoetical at hypoetical.net.
The conflict in the music of Young Architect, aka Y?Arcka, aka WHY?Arcka, aka Philadelphia-based Shawn Kelly, is between the modesty of his materials and the intensity of his intent. He does more with less than any other beat-minded producer I’m aware of. You can hear little bits of NERD in there, with his metronomic pulse and his affection for classic soul, and you can hear DJ Premier, with his ability to utilize acoustic instruments without losing their looseness, and you can hear J Dilla, with his taste for broken beats. But more than any of that you hear him.
Here’s just one track, “We Used 2 Be (Hip Hop),” off his delectable Half Order Out of Chaos:
[ Normally there would be a player embedded here that would play the track, but the Bandcamp one seems to be messing up this site's HTML for some reason right now. To hear the track, proceed to youngarchitect.bandcamp.com. ]
The way he uses tiny snippets of a vocal and builds this flowing rhythm of pointillist misdirection simply deserves far more attention than it’s currently receiving.
Recommended reading, news, and so forth elsewhere:
¶ Tinkerer, Hacker, Solderer … Felon?: The idea that when we purchase consumer electronics devices we’re not free to do with them as we wish can feel like this consensual extralegal hallucination, but until it gets to the Supreme Court it’s going to remain in that wonderful zone of Forever Litigation (apologies to Joe Haldeman). We can look forward to “Master Chief v John Doe” on the docket some day — who knows which side Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney will take? — but in the meanwhile, an attempt to convict someone (a man in his late 20s named Matthew Crippen) for modding Microsoft Xbox 360s has ended, albeit on a procedural technicality: engadget.com, wired.com, joystiq.com. There doesn’t appear to be a Crippen entry at freedom-to-tinker.com, but that site, hosted by Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP), is a treasure trove of issues such as this one. As for the Microsoft case, it always seems remarkable when a company founded by hackers goes to war against hackers. Let’s be hopeful that Xbox’s new Kinect doesn’t get the same sort of helicopter-parent attention. Because the Kinect is proving eminently (intentionally, some might say) hackable: crunchgear.com, hackaday.com.
¶ DJ Hero (Circa 1985): While on the subject of extralegal gaming, this rendition of the audiogame DJ Hero needs to be seen to be believed. It re-imagines the game as if it had been programmed for an NES system back around the time Ronald Reagan was entering his second term as president:
This is no mere retro dream scenario. You can download the actual functioning game at ericruthgames.com. It speaks to the energy within the so-called chiptune, or 8bit, music community. If you think chiptune is just a self-conscious geek fetish, it’s important to understand it’s more than faux arcade music created long after the fact. A game like Ruth’s — which is to say the effort that goes into such games — speaks to the benefit many find in viewing our current technological experiences through the technology of the near past. As chiptune/8bit develops as a culture, it becomes increasingly like a near-past version of steampunk. (I was initially going to say “recent past,” but “near past” is better, because it aligns with the more common term, “near future.”) How 8bit culture differs from steampunk is worth spending more time pondering. One particular strong point is the way a new generation pushes old technology past its previous understood limits, both functionally and creatively; the result raises the bar for software engineering today, when practitioners feel less constrained — a situation that has led to bloatware, feature creep, and other tendencies of our time.
¶ Lacquered Up: Footage of the “Urushi musical interface,” developed by designer and musician Yuri Suzuki with composer/musician Matthew Rogers:
Apparently it resulted from a program led by Emiko Oki, intended to cross-pollinate British designers and traditional “lacquer craftsmen of Wajima, in Ishikawa prefecture.” More on Suzuki at yurisuzuki.com. Found via designboom.com. The photos at designboom.com show that the craft isn’t simply that of the lacquer experts; there’s a lot of detail about the musical interface’s development and production. This is way older than steampunk. This is Kamakura-punk.
¶ System-ing the Game Music: There’s discussion of procedural music systems going on at fe01.redstonewire.com, the Minecraft game’s message board. That’s via twitter.com/dizzybanjo, aka Robert Thomas, who is CCO at RjDj, the reactive-audio tool, and who after some message-board nay-saying by others weighs in with some constructive ideas:
In terms of how procedural music for games / virtual worlds is created – I agree with some points on this thread. When programming procedural music, its important to somehow codify the musical structures that are present in the types of compositions, or improvisations you want the system to create. This is an art form in itself.
¶ The Music Industry vs the Record Industry: Thanks to Alan Wexelblat of copyfight.corante.com for noting the Disquiet.com Despite the Downturn compilation (a multi-artist critique-in-music, or “answer album, to a specious article in The Atlantic by Megan McArdle) in his discussion of Jeff Price‘s “The State of The Music Industry & the Delegitimization of Artists,” which debunks a lot of music-business doomsday scenarios and received wisdom. Writes Wexelblat: “If this argument sounds familiar, it should: Marc Weidenbaum made this point back in May, though he did it artistically rather than by crunching the numbers.” Price’s work is at blog.tunecore.com.
¶ Give ‘Em a Beat: And the Stonesthrow Records weekly Beat Battles are rapidly approaching their 200th (!) consecutive week. Those battles are one of the major locus points of casual copyleft artistry and intense communal creativity on the Internet, a place where musicians, week in, week out, take a single shared sampled and see what they all manage to make with and (for the more accomplished ones) of it, extrapolate from it, limited by time (less than a week) and aesthetic (in the end, it’s all about the beat). Discussion has begun as to what will be the sample for week 200: stonesthrow.com.
Great (joke) public-utility UI: http://t.co/LNnRDXKX says to go to @sf311's site to "log on" for support. There's no self-evident login tool 16 mins ago
With its echoes of Wagon Christ and Funki Porcini and DJ Krush and Kid Koala, Pendulum by San Jose, California-based Hypoetical builds old-school hip-hop beats from hazy fragments of melodramatic found sounds — an association Hypoetical engages with directly by titling the album’s 21st and final track, a three-minute rhapsody for thumping beat and a handful of piano notes, “Elevator Music” (