Thanks to some bulgogi-bloating Korean BBQ on Wednesday night, I missed sets from 12th Planet and Mary Anne Hobbs at the Scion House Party at The Roxy. Such are the consequences of $16.99 all-you-can-eat dinners. Thankfully, the Fullerton Dubstep don dropped a blistering mix on Hobbs’ BBC 1XTRA show last Wednesday, full of rarely heard material that wobbles like a 504 Boy (on another note, why hasn’t a dubstep producer remixed this yet?)

Another star in the seemingly limitless Southern Cali constellation, 12th’s music works well with a strong set of headphones, but even better live, with his sets prone to disemboweling bass, wall-rattling dub, and hip-hop (under the name Infiltrata, he’s done remixes ranging from Rass Kass to Grand Puba to Portishead.) I’ve said this before, but some enterprising sociologist needs to draw the parallels between the ever-increasing quality of chronic and the avant-garde turns our producers have taken. For those checking the pulse of hip-hop, consider that a generation ago, these guys would’ve surely ranked as Rated Rookies, but have largely abdicated the genre for more progressive pastures. And no, gimmicky compilations like this or this don’t count, even if both have their moments and score points for effort. If only this was a game of horseshoes…a game of horseshoes. 

Video interviews with 12th below the jump, courtesy of Vapors.

Download:
MP3:  Mary Anne Hobbs ft. 12th Planet, DJ Evol, DLX, Pawn & Emu Mixes (Left-Click)
MP3: 12th Planet Vs. Rass Kass-”West Coast Dub”

MP3: Portishead-”Hunter” (Re-Imagined By 12th Planet of The Noise Floor Crew)
MP3: 12th Planet (Infiltrata)-Dogs on Acid Infiltrata Mix

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Photo by Christopher Soltis

Give XLR8R credit. While the economic crash has turned most print mags into skeletal shells (shills?) of their former self or has found them unable to find an Internet niche, the San Francisco-based dance publication has survived with its integrity intact. Outside of RA, few places have covered the bass/wonky/dubstep explosion in greater depth, with their latest cover story on Joker perhaps the most extensive look at the Bristol wunderkind yet. Granted, that’s not saying much–the guy’s either shy or has the personality of cream of wheat (which has surprisingly little personality despite the jovial fellow on the box).

Now they’ve enlisted Nosaj Thing for a must-download podcast with unreleased Flying Lotus, Teebs, and Jason Chung tracks. Not to mention Samiyam, Exile, Gaslamp, Ras G, Daedelus, and Tokimonsta. Amounted together, it might as well be a Best of the Low End Theory compilation, and another reason why…I don’t need to give you another reason. Tracklist below the jump. True Train Wreck not included (there are enough of those in SoCal).

Download:
MP3: XLR8R- Nosaj Thing Podcast

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My post about Robot Koch’s excellent Death Star Droid  a few weeks ago drew deafening silence, save for Doc Zeus agreeing with me about how pitiful it was for Koch to switch their name to E1. Fair enough. Now the estimable Berlin-born android is passing out another pair of tracks, in addition to the pair of still available mixes. “Away From” isn’t really dubstep, lacking the heavy wobble and low BPMs. It’s probably closer to the generically named “Bass” or “Wonky,” which I suspect are labels that have wisely been crafted to avoid calling it “instrumental hip-hop.” Ah, the power of re-branding. And if that’s another way to get people to listen to the clipped vocal samples, dusty drums, and nocturnal narcotic tone, then so be it. For his second trick, he enlists 19-year old LA native, Shlohmo to slow down the pace of DSD track, “Gorom Sen” to create something entirely new: haunting, otherworldly, and filled with unintelligible gibberish. Sort of like a David Lynch film, except with less nudity, red lampshades, and non-sequiturs.

Download:
MP3: Robot Koch-”Away From”
MP3: Robot Koch-”Gorom Sen”

Montreal Dubstep ambassador Komodo knows how to have a good time. The promoter and host of the city’s best bass music night, Komodo Dubs, is an infectious whirlwind of energy behind the decks–bouncing, swaying and generally acting like a one man cheerleader for Croydon’s musical offspring in the land of plaid shirts and bad indie bands. Taking the stage at Montreal’s SAT club/art-space with a sampler full of new material, Komodo’s spaced-out take on Dubstep was more live performance than DJ set, punctuated by live subbass courtesy of the man’s trademark didgeridoo and a fantastic interpretive dance piece by an uncredited artiste seemingly ripped straight out of 19th century opium dream. If all this sounds gimmicky on paper, rest assured that when powered by government-funded subwoofers (viva la socialism) and a Redman approved-blunt full of berry-blaster, the fusion of traditional Australian instrumentation, London-dread and Holy-Ghost dancing proved that a “DJ set” could be as theatrical and visually arresting as any other live performance. By the time the dancer took her bow, the crowd was almost too mesmerized to bounce to the high-energy riddims that ended the set. Almost.

Bravely named 19-year-old London headliner Sukh Knight on the other hand went straight for the jugular, attacking the crowd with a relentless barrage of skanking, high-energy half-step for the majority of his 90+ minutes on stage. Built mostly out of his own tracks including the devastatingly heavy Ganja (twice reloaded) and the Doggystyle sampling “Beneath your Blouse”, Sukh’s set was an exemplary demonstration of 2009 Dubstep at its best. Admittedly inspired by 90’s rap alums Mobb Deep, Wu-Tang and Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, the kid’s material is equal part menace and aggression, well suited for both head nodding and bouncing. Though electronic music’s chin-stroking set occasionally bemoans Dubstep’s current direction, it’s hard to argue with a packed room full of people losing their minds to the music, particularly when at least half of those people were straight dime pieces. Besides, the night’s biggest reaction may well have gone to the delirious tune “Sweet Shop: by Doctor P, a funky mix of acid house, D&B and wobble that proves that the genre’s multiple directions can not only coexist but also recombine into something even fresher and more exciting.

Download:
MP3: Sukh Knight – “Ganja Dub”
MP3: Sukh Knight-”Knight Life”

A while back in the comment section, some semi-anonymous seer inveighed against my admiration for what Stones Throw is doing. I don’t get it. Unlike most of the now mostly moribund labels of the indie-rap boom, they’ve managed to keep quality control high, output steady, and craft a sensible and generous promotional policy for the digital age. Granted, the Atwater-based label isn’t above putting out the occasional dud, but they’ve been few and far between.  And over the last two years, with the launch of Egon’s Now-Again spinoff, few imprints are able to match the impeccable excavation they’ve done in unearthing lost gems from all ends of the earth.

There is competition (Tompkins Square, Light in the Attic, Soundways, Strut, Subliminal Sounds), but Forge Your Own Chains provides unimpeachable evidence for Now-Again’s excellence in the field of excellence. The crate-digging equivalent of shale oil extraction. Compiling largely anonymous American, Asian, Latin American, and Middle Eastern acts united by their love of lysergics and their skill at creating haunting and woozy one-offs, it’s one of the more essential compilations in a year with a lot of essential compilations. You probably haven’t heard any of these groups before, but you probably should have.  To boot, the packaging comes with a 40 page book complete with extensive mini-bios about each group, it’s an impressive touch and a wise move to entice wary buyers. Doc Ellis would approve.

Download:
MP3: Damon-”Don’t You Feel Me”
MP3: Guilty Simpson & Oh No-”My Time to Shine”

The label says “featuring Aarya,” but you’d be forgiven for mistaking the digitized vocalist on Guido’s newest A-side “Beautiful Complication” for yet another sheet of synths layered into the mix. Taking Autotune&B to its logical conclusion, the Bristol Wunderkind’s blend of early experimental Timbaland, Rave music euphoria and Dubstep heaviness smoothes over any roughness inherent in the track. The results practically negate the lyrical drama: this is seduction music for the medicated generation with production so shiny it should come with it’s own Pen & Pixel cover and Hype Williams video. With so many producers retreating to predictable Garage rhythms when faced with the onslaught of filthy half-step tunes now dominating the scene, it’s encouraging to see the Bristol kids finding a third way forward, keeping the swinging heaviness but saturating the high end with musical neon and much needed femininity.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTWMtdFSR_0

Lost last week in the 45-post a day, ad impression shuffle was the video for Freddie Gibbs and Pill’s “Womb 2 the Tomb,” an instant-classic from Freddie Gibbs’ instant-classic mixtape, Midwestgangstaboxframecadillacmuzick. Directed by Skee TV go-to-director, Matt Alonzo, the almost five minute clip is a mini tour de force: a gothic, grainy, black and white blur of Gibbs and Pill stalking the badlands peripheral to downtown Los Angeles, shrouded by graffiti and conquered rivers, old aqueducts and faded tombstones. Their backpacks are bloated with drugs, and everything is swarmed by shadows. The clip derives a tremendous power from its solemn simplicity and concrete symbolism, particularly in context to Gibbs and Pill’s funereal ode to the art of hustling. Had it been released in 1994, it would’ve owned Yo! MTV Raps for months, earned terrestrial radio play, sold 250,000 cassingles, and won the duo face time in various rap magazines with a circulation hovering near half a million. It’s the sort of video that makes you remember why you loved hip-hop in the first place.

Instead, it was sandwiched between Teaser #2 for the next 48 Hours with Rick Ross and Triple C and pictures from a Sean Price video shoot, only to disappear from the home page of the major aggregators within the afternoon. Not to imply that Pill and Gibbs are exactly starving for media coverage. The New York Times and the New Yorker have devoted space to both, and I have a forthcoming feature in the LA Weekly on Gibbs. But despite the fourth estate attention, a salient problem persists–namely, how meaning and impact are perpetually blunted by the deafening babble of the Internet (and not in the good “perpetually blunted” way). It feels like very little matters, and when it does, it lasts only a news cycle. With listening patterns more diffuse than ever and even the most tin-foil hatted dissenters allowed a voice, there’s a sense of free-for-all, the atomization that Sasha Frere-Jones spoke of in his New Yorker essay, with rap fans clustering in like-minded hives, content to crown Wacka Flacka or Tanya Morgan the next to blow, depending on your acceptance or aversion to twang.

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Many moons ago, there was this. Then there was this. Now Jonathan Bradley looks back at what many believe is the best Lil Wayne album. As Cheech Marin said upon witnessing the rising of the Titanic in in Ghostbusters II: better late than never.

At the bottom of the bayou, rising up from the mud and murk, lurks something animal– a shark, a lion with a throaty roar, and a raw hunger. “Let’s eat,” he exults, “and talk about all the niggas we cut.” But you know what? Let’s not fuck up our lunch. Let’s talk about the thick guitars and swampy rhythms over which Dwayne Carter exhales–scungy, grimy-ass, mudded-up sounds for a crusted-over vocal, like setting gasoline on fire. “Deep down in the dirty, there lies us,” he says, storming the barricades. His origin story is fundamental; he’s from “the sky, where the thunder’s crying.” It’s primal, sifted out and soaked up from the history of his region: “You heard it right here if the game was ever told/Lift up your toes and look under the rug/Trust me, that’s history under all that dust.”

That’s just the first track, five minutes of hot spitting. Sicker than a hospital, he is. New Orleans “gangsta gumbo” from a city where “you ain’t tryin to see how far that black back lane go.” Sweaty, violent and intoxicating, loping hyena-like across the track. He approaches rap with the appetite of a carnivore, tearing off chunks of language, chewing them and savoring the taste. Tha Carter II is a tactile album, from its bass thumps to its guitar growls and more than anything else, its protagonist’s feverish imagery–both base and boundless.

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So quoth the Million Dollar Man: everybody has their price.  Thankfully, this is free. Also, the employment of “Fish” midway through Daddy Kev’s set is just an impeccable decision.

Download:
MP3: Low End Theory Podcast IX: Daddy Kev and Dibiase

I’d been meaning to write something on the very solid King Midas Sound collaboration between singer/poet Roger Robinson and British dubstep deacon Kevin Martin, or as he is more popularly known around these parts, The Bug. However, the ever-dependable Nate Patrin does my homework for me with his Pitchfork review: “every strength this record holds, draws off the symbiotic relationship between Martin’s beats and Robinson’s voice, which adapt to each other in a way that the last two people in a barren environment might. This is dub production rendered as the final reverberations of a deserted cityscape, infused with a crumbling low-end that does for bass what a single fluorescent tube in an underground concrete tunnel does for light. And the voice decorates it like a spiderweb– fragile in appearance, but structurally resilient enough to hold strong against the rhythm.”

Needless to say, if you don’t like spiderwebs and/or this record, you may be a coward. Also, recommended reading is this Fact magazine Q&A, where Martin and Robinson reveal their inspirations (Lover’s Rock, Horace Andy, Gregory Isaacs, Cornell Campbell), how living in London affects their sound, and Robinson’s rapso past (a form of rapped calypso music native to Trinidad, who knew?).

Download:
MP3: King Midas Sound-”Cool Out” (Left-Click)
MP3: King Midas Sound-”One Ting (Dabrye Remix)” (Left-Click)