The current season of Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan’s *Westworld*, the fourth, is probably the best since the first. There’s a major sonic component that I can’t really describe without spoiling things, so take that as the warning for people who worry about SPOILERS (in all caps because people who don’t like spoilers can get loud about it).
I’m not concerned with spoilers at all, myself, but so be it. Let the following vertical, manga-style ellipsis protect you from what you do not know:
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The Downstream section on Disquiet.com is a regular series of recommended recordings. The material is usually focused on recent music, and it’s generally the case that the music is in some way freely accessible — i.e., even if it’s for sale, you can listen to it somehow, even if only through an ad-supported streaming service. Today’s entry is an exception to both those norms.
Cut Chemist (aka Lucas MacFadden, ex-Jurassic 5 and Ozomatli) has a subscription service through Bandcamp packed with fantastic old-school hip-hop instrumentals (by artists other than himself) that he’s accumulated over the years. They’re inaccessible from his own [cutchemist.bandcamp.com](https://cutchemist.bandcamp.com) page unless you pay a monthly (Patreon-style) fee. Then they pop up under the A Stable Sound Club tab. The audio benefits from his own digital preservation efforts. As he explains in an accompanying blog post, “I’ve been doing some serious reconstruction for these. From sourcing, to clean up, remastering and editing.”
The latest batch, [*Cut’s Crate #16 Rare 80’s Hip Hop Instrumentals*](https://cutchemist.bandcamp.com/album/cuts-crate-16-rare-80s-hip-hop-instrumentals?from=sub-nr), released on June 20, includes choice material from Beastie Boys (“Time to Get Ill”), Cold Crush Brothers (“Feel the Horns”), and Big Daddy Kane (“Ain’t No Half Steppin”), all shorn of their vocals, leaving just the backing tracks.
For an earlier collection, [*Cut’s Crate #15 1990’s Rap Rare Show Vinyl*](https://cutchemist.bandcamp.com/album/cuts-crate-15-1990s-rap-rare-show-vinyl-instrumentals), released the month prior, he rightly singles out one track in particular from the set, Digable Planets’ “Where I’m From Stripped Down Show Instrumental,” for its exquisite simplicity: “I particularly like the Digable Planets stripped down version of Where I’m From to accommodate their touring live band.” The way the sampled horn just echoes amid the spare drum loop is trance-like. Here’s a YouTube copy of the original “Where I’m From” instrumental (the “Novox” — which is to say, no voice — mix), which has some additional elements, including vocal snippets and crowd noise at the opening and closing:
Also — and this may simply be a matter of the way the YouTube version was processed — the horns move much more widely in the stereo spectrum in Cut Chemist’s “Stripped Down” copy.
Note: These aren’t amalgams that Cut Chemist created from the originals. They’re proper instrumentals he has collected: “These have been given to me,” he explains in a blog post, also for [subscribers only](https://cutchemist.bandcamp.com/community?sid=831089&st=sm), “by the artist, producer or label so no bootlegs were used.”
One of the unfortunate aspects of modern streaming services is that a lot of the instrumentals that accompanied singles in their original form are absent from the collective jukebox in the cloud. Fortunately, YouTube headz keep a lot of it in circulation, but hip-hop and r&b instrumentals aren’t as readily accessible as they used to be, back when vinyl 12″s were the primary means of distribution — nor are they as accessible as they should be, at least not in the contemporary scenario, where streaming is the norm. Many instrumentals aren’t available commercially at all, except used on vinyl via eBay and Discogs. Hip-hop instrumentals are a huge part of — and parallel to — the history of electronic music, and Cut Chemist is doing his part to keep the tracks out there.
An occasional answer to a frequent question: *“What have you been listening to lately?”* These are annotated, albeit lightly, because I don’t like reposting material without providing some context. I hope to write more about these in the future, but didn’t want to delay sharing them.
▰ One highlight of the various artists album [*MSCTY_EXPO_UNKNOWN PLEASURES ZONE*](https://msctyeditions.bandcamp.com/album/mscty-expo-unknown-pleasures-zone-2) is a mix of drones and wordless vocals by Hannah Peel. The record also features work by Loraine James, Akrafokonmu, Yuri Suzuki, mcconville, Bill Fontana, and Yuval Avital.
▰ **Julia Reidy**’s [*World in World*](https://blacktruffle.bandcamp.com/album/world-in-world) is an album of otherly tonal, often textural, experimental guitar tracks with occasional vocal touches.
▰ Yasushi Ide’s new album, [*Cosmic Suite2-New Beginning-*](https://yasushiide.bandcamp.com/album/cosmic-suite2-new-beginning), includes a variety of collaborators, among them DJ Krush for this dubby treat, “Outer Space”:
I do this manually each Saturday, usually in the morning over coffee: collating most of the tweets I made the past week at twitter.com/disquiet, which I think of as my public notebook. Some tweets pop up sooner in [expanded form](https://disquiet.com/2022/07/23/the-sound-of-michael-mann/) or otherwise on Disquiet.com. I’ve found it personally informative to revisit the previous week of thinking out loud. This isn’t a full accounting. Often there are, for example, conversations on Twitter that don’t really make as much sense out of the context of Twitter itself. And sometimes I tweak them a bit, given the additional space. And sometimes I re-order them just a bit.
▰ If you say “human” enough the voice menu eventually gets the point.
▰ Soundtrack: buncha kids on some sorta summer camp stroll walking by while singing loudly in perfect misharmony, muffled by wind and walls and traffic.
▰ Ludwig Göransson is scoring Christopher Nolan’s upcoming film, *Oppenheimer*. Very much looking forward to it.
▰ From today’s New York Times mini crossword. An across clue: “8 electronica instrument” (5 spaces).
▰ One of the “Physics Cost-Saving Tips” from today’s XKCD:
▰ “It is not on any map. True places never are.”
I’m enjoying Todd Eliot’s *Moby Dick* (re)read in particular and book blog in general: [thelithole.com](https://thelithole.com/2022/07/19/obligations-what-i-am-reading-white-whale/).
▰ *Quicksilver* by Neal Stephenson is the 18th novel I’ve finished reading this year. I strive to get into historical fiction but I’m usually left wanting to read more history. I’m not sure I’m moving on to volume two of the Baroque Cycle for a while. *Diamond Age* and *Cryptonomicon* remain my favorite Stephenson novels.
I’ll read anything about Michael Mann, so, clearly, I’ll be reading the upcoming *Heat 2* (!) novel (!!), co-written with Meg Gardiner. I love that this [lengthy New York Times interview](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/20/magazine/michael-mann-ferrari-heat-2.html) gets into the role of sound in Mann’s productions, for film and TV alike.
>Pinned to a wall behind him were several images of vintage Ferraris painted different screaming reds. He’d tasked his crew with making full-body 3-D scans of these vehicles, crafting perfect facsimile shells and fitting these with contemporary drivetrains capable of high-performance racing. Special recordings, Mann said, would capture the engine sound of period-accurate “small-displacement V12s running very high, this shriek, driving down narrow canyons through masonry, then suddenly they’re out in an open field.” He smiled. “It’ll feel like the air is being ripped apart.”
More from the Times article, written by Jonah Weiner. It’s mostly about Mann’s upcoming movie, *Ferrari* (a biopic I’d otherwise pay close to zero attention to, but, you know, it’s Michael Mann).
>[Christopher] Nolan calls “Heat” Mann’s masterpiece, and when we spoke, he singled out a “tiny detail during the bank robbery, where the money is stacked and wrapped in plastic, and they put it into the duffel bags, then use a razor to slash the plastic and bang it, so that it comes loose and takes the shape of the bag.” This moment flies by, but it “grounds the entire robbery in a technical reality that you respect and enjoy,” Nolan said. “You feel you’re watching a film about experts made by experts.” The sequence’s most indelible aspect is its terrifying sound. Mann recorded the gunfire — “full-load” blanks, containing the same powder charge as live ammo — not on a soundstage, as is common practice, but out on the streets, as it reverberated off the sunny steel-and-glass canyons onscreen.
I wrote a short appreciation of *Thief* in 2019 for [hilobrow.com](https://www.hilobrow.com/2019/08/21/convoy-your-enthusiasm-21/), and followed that up with a close listen to his feature debut, a TV movie called [*The Jericho Mile*](https://disquiet.com/2020/02/05/mann-the-jericho-mile/).
