Nas – It ‘Aint Hard to Tell

My remix of the finale track on the best hip hop album of all time, featuring sampled bass loop from Julian Priester and Marianne Intrusion’s ‘Anatomy of Longing‘ and sax samples from Kryzstof Komeda’s “Astigmatic.”

MF Doom – Change the Beat (JChan Momento Ritmico Remix)

All three parts of the original “Change the Beat” fit MF Doom’s Bukowski-tinged free-association to a T – here’s my take featuring loops from Piero Umiliani‘s “Momento Ritmico“, Cannonball Adderly’s “Eye of the Cosmos” and Kryzstof Komeda’s “Astigmatic”.

El Da Sensei – Brothas ‘Aint Got It (JChan Digable Remix)

Flipped this El Da Sensei track with a sample of the intro bassline from Taveres’s “Bad Times” – which Digable Planets used on “Dial 7 (Axioms of Creamy Spies)” back in the day.

Insomniacs

I sleep like shit most nights – been this way my whole life. Special shout out goes out to all the narcoleptics, graveyard shift zombies, nightcrawlers and insomniacs out there. What I lose in sleep I make up for in beats.

Piano sample is from “Chez le Photographe du Motel” off of Miles Davis’s soundtrack to the French film ‘Ascenseur Pour L’Échafaud‘, along with samples from “Monkey Conquers the Demon.”

D.A.F. – Co Co Pina (JChan Jumbled Remix)

In high school and freshman year at Boston University I was big into industrial music – Ministry, Front 242, Wax Trax, Skinny Puppy and the like. I probably spent haf of my pocket money freshman year buying industrial-edged CDs at Nuggets and Tower Records – where I picked up a compilation of proto-industrial weirdness called Tyranny of the Beat put out by Mute records (founded by Daniel Miller of The Normal – best known for ‘Warm Leatherette’) and featuring tracks by groups like Throbbing Gristle, Can and Wire that were mostly recorded in the 70s and early 80s.

Raekwon ftg Ghostface – Criminology (JChan Clarity Remix)

This one’s a banger – made with a guitar loop lifted from Seu Jorge and Dona Ica (check out Seu’s role as “Knockabout Ned” in City of God) and some out-of-the-box reggae organ.

Slate: How the Drum Machine Changed Pop Music

Love ’em or hate ’em, it’s impossible to deny how much drum machines have impacted modern music tastes and sensibilities, as this recent article on Slate explains:

People tend to associate drum machines with the 1980s, the age of the Roland TR-808—which helped define a long stretch of hip hop with ground-shaking bass—and the digital Linn LM-1, which used the sampled sounds of real drums. But the drum machine made its first tentative steps into pop music in the early 1970s. There’s a Riot is the centerpiece of a cluster of watershed moments in early drum machine history. Brian Wilson used it around the same time for the song “Til I Die” (perhaps something about drum machines appealed to reclusive pop geniuses?). It’s all over JJ Cale’s album Naturally, released in December of 1971. In Germany, Can and Kraftwerk also dove into this new world of sound—to a whole other, weird, effect. In the next few years, Bob Marley, Shuggie Otis, and others would follow suit … Beyond aesthetic considerations, the rise of the drum machine represented a philosophical shift. Ceding the job of rhythm, which mirrors the human heart and respiratory rates, to circuits and wires overhauled notions of what it means to make music.

TheBeijinger: Birdy Nam Nam at Yugong Yishan Tomorrow Night

Here’s a post I penned for thebeijinger previewing French turntablist crew Birdy Nam Nam’s show in Beijing tomorrow night – good hip hop shows are few and far between in our fair city:

Birdy Namnam are no mere knob twiddlers – the four-man French DJ “band” take an instrumentalist’s approach to turntables and collaborate to create beat-laden compositions out of sampled sounds and instrumental parts pressed on vinyl.

Gang Starr – Mass Appeal (JChan Mulatu-centrics Remix)

I’m ashamed to admit I slept on Ethiopian jazzman Mulatu Astatke until Heliocentrics collaborated with him on the landmark “Inspiration Information 3” in 2008 – their unique combination of hip hop-informed East African tinged instrumental jazz-funk (or whatever you want to call it) opened my ears to an entirely new direction in music.

On this track I sampled the piano intro to their  from their track “Phantom of the Panter.” Of course there’s no way to outdo DJ Premier’s monumental minimalist production Gang Starr’s “Mass Appeal,” but maybe you’ll dig this little divergence (despite the over-compressed acapella – I need to find a better version for this part).

Strummy (JChan Ege Bamyasi Mix)

Can’s “Vitamin C” and Miguel De Deus’s “Black Soul Brothers” for the beat; “Cacha Mechanica” (artist unknown) for the guitar sample and a piano loop from Krysztof Komeda’s soundtrack to Roman Polanski’s “Knife in the Water.”

The tight freak-out grooves on Krautrock pioneers Can’s Ege Bamyasi make it my favorite album in their wide-ranging discography. I really wanted to emulate that free-form sound in my band in grad school – but while the “free” part was do-able for us, the “form” didn’t work out so well due to my not-so-polished drum skills. Thank god for automatic beat-matching.