Like a Scientist

The evo­lu­tion of instru­men­tal beats has been an inter­est­ing one to watch. Obvi­ously it began with clas­sic hip-hop, espe­cially when pro­duc­ers like Pete Rock, DJ Pre­mier, Large Pro­fes­sor and oth­ers made their mark in the hey­day of the 90s. Care­fully crafted sam­ples and invented drum pro­gram­ming made what were largely meant to be back­ing tracks into music that could be heard with­out vocals. Then came the rise of Mo’Wax and espe­cially DJ Shadow, some­one who looms large in the area of instru­men­tal beats. Mean­while, the style of music where this came from was chang­ing itself, as hip-hop mutated into the fast-paced drums and and hyper synths that came to dom­i­nate the 2000s. While this was going on a new gen­er­a­tion of instru­men­tal pro­duc­ers sprang up all over the globe, in Lon­don, in Glas­gow, in Rus­sia, and in Los Ange­les. The beats con­tinue to shift and change, though, those video game synths of pop­u­lar hip-hop have melded together with the drum exper­i­men­ta­tions of the new pro­duc­ers to forge new sounds unlike any­thing that came before. More

Cleve­land was treated to a taste of Los Ange­les and Low End The­ory last night at the Grog Shop. Over the past few years a unique and bur­geon­ing music scene has sprung up around the weekly club night Low End The­ory in Los Ange­les. Through a shared love of beats and pro­gres­sive sounds, the night has led to the pop­u­lar­ity of artists like Nosaj Thing, The Glitch Mob, Nocando, Teebs, Gaslamp Killer and, of course, Fly­ing Lotus. Rarely do these artists come through the Mid­west so this was some­thing spe­cial. More

My Like a Sci­en­tist drafts are con­tin­u­ing to mount. I’ll get them fin­ished off sooner or later. I’ve been steadily writ­ing for FACT and Lit­tle White Ear­buds and wanted to offer a lit­tle update.

For FACT, I wrote reviews of Eskmo’s self-titled album and John Roberts’ Glass Eights, both of which are great.

For Lit­tle White Ear­buds, I’ve been turn­ing in a review a week of releases by artists such as Rustie, Kryp­tic Minds, Numan, Jack Spar­row, Fly­ing Lotus, among oth­ers. You can see a cur­rent list here.

In the field of new style beats, there’s been an embar­rass­ment of riches released for free over the past cou­ple weeks. First there was the incred­i­ble Fly Rus­sia com­pi­la­tion from Error Broad­cast, and then Svet­lana Indus­tries released another giant com­pi­la­tion called Come On Lets Go just last week. More

As hazy, woozy, psy­che­delic beats go, 22-year-old Chris Ward (Trop­ics) is main­lin­ing a healthy help­ing of 70s and 80s sounds and tex­tures. With ethe­real, near-balearic vocals and slinky syn­thetic per­cus­sion, “Give It Up” lazily shim­mers by, at once ignor­ing con­tem­po­raries like Boards of Canada and embrac­ing that heady lin­eage. There is a dreamy qual­ity on this track works well with the nos­tal­gic disco sheen of it’s sounds. More

For­ward think­ing beats and bewil­der­ing sound­scapes isn’t nor­mally what you think of when “Rus­sia” is men­tioned, but the inter­est in hip-hop goes back a long way in that fed­er­a­tion, not least because of DJ Vadim’s break­through records. Just like jeans are a global export, hip-hop and synths travel the world and heads pick up on that legacy con­stantly. More

Months in the mak­ing, I’m really proud to launch a new ver­sion of the Like a Sci­en­tist web­site. Go to the home page and update your links: www.LikeaScientist.com. More

Even though this blog has slowed in out­put, I’m still out there writ­ing about music and try­ing to raise aware­ness of some of the great stuff being pro­duced cur­rently. More

My first encounter with lis­ten­ing to Mary Anne Hobbs was in 2000 when she had James Lavelle (of Mo’Wax and Unkle) and Pablo (of Psy­cho­nauts) on the show to mix it up. Specif­i­cally I had read that they had played an acetate of the then-unheard “Giv­ing Up The Ghost” track that DJ Shadow had made for Michael Mann’s The Insider. Never used, it even­tu­ally appeared on the follow-up to Endtro­duc­ing, The Pri­vate Press. This was the time of post–Endtro­duc­ing Shadow obses­sion for me and many oth­ers. How was I to hear this slice of new music? More

Long time read­ers of this blog will know that I’ve been a fan of the var­i­ous doings of The Glitch Mob for awhile now. From first stum­bling upon Ooah’s mixes to mixes and albums by edIT, they’ve been on my watch list for awhile. A full-length album for them seemed to be rumored years ago but it wasn’t until recently that they solid­i­fied The Glitch Mob has a per­form­ing and record­ing force to be reck­oned with. How­ever, as a group known pri­mar­ily for doing crazy “glitch remixes” of pop­u­lar songs, how were they going to trans­late this into an orig­i­nal album? The answer was to go back to basics and method­i­cally com­pose and per­form music as a band. More