Hailing from LA’s very own Watt’s, Dibiase a.k.a Diabolic’s productions run the gambit from 8 bit video game classics to seductive soul to raw grungy bangers. This 12 time beat battle champion and runner up of the Los Angeles Red Bull Big Tune Beat Battle has no limitations. No sample is safe (Last.fm, 2010).
Born and bred in Weston, Massachussetts, Edward Ma, now known to the world as edIT, began his music career as “The Con Artist” just before the turn of the millennium. As a resident DJ at the now defunct Konkrete Jungle Los Angeles, he shared the stage with Hive, Daddy Kev, James Tai and mic rockers Busdriver, P.E.A.C.E. and Mikah 9. Konkrete Jungle marked the golden age of indie hip-hop in Los Angeles, and was the bridge between the jungle and b-boy massives. During this time, he also held a residency at Dublab Radio. He was one of the very first Dublab DJs and broadcasted two weekly shows from the legendary Melrose Avenue studio. Far ahead of its time, Dublab operated as an internet radio station and served as a unifying force for the melting pot of L.A.’s intellectual DJ culture. During this musical renaissance, edIT used “The Con Artist” name to produce and engineer for the likes of Sole (Anticon), Busdriver (Epitaph), Aloe Blacc (Stones Throw), Emanon (Shaman Work), and Dr. Oop (Black Love).
It was 2003 when “The Con Artist” adopted the edIT moniker, while finishing his debut solo album Crying Over Pros for No Reason. The album was released by µ-Ziq’s Planet-Mu imprint a year later in 2004. The album was a downtempo love-maker’s epic about opportunities lost. Shortly thereafter, he shifted gears towards the dance floor and remixed Daedelus’ “Dumbfound” for Plug Research, which became a party rockin’ classic, and further established edIT as a force to be reckoned with in the IDM and electronic worlds. Aside from remixes, edIT garnered a lot of fame through his mash-ups of Top 40 radio jams by ridiculously cutting up a cappellas with hyper-glitch edits over original and popular hip-hop beats. His MySpace page started getting serious traffic (over 250,000 plays at this point) which led to URB Magazine naming him one of the “Next 100” artists to watch in 2006. The popularity of his mash-ups also led to a full-length mixtape commissioned by Hefty Records for their 10-year anniversary where he mashed the Hefty catalog with the likes of Li’l Wayne, T.I., Paul Wall and more. This mix became an overnight cult classic and was talk of the blogoshpere.
Next, edIT’s focus turned towards original productions and his highly-anticipated sophomore album Certified Air Raid Material. Being released this Fall by L.A.’s most daring indie label Alpha Pup Records, the album has been a long four years in the making, featuring collaborations with close allies such as The Grouch, Busdriver, TTC, Abstract Rude and D-Styles. Suffice to say, Certified Air Raid Material is a dramatic departure from the melancholy downtempo sounds of Crying Over Pros for No Reason. Upbeat, energetic and impossibly complex, Certified Air Raid Material has certainly raised the bar for state-of-the-art electronic music production. The record is a tour de force of sheer production and engineering genius, resulting in a soulful and futuristic style of dance music that is incomparable to anything else out there (Last.fm, 2010).
Mike Boo is a San Francisco instrumental beat maker, electronic producer and sound designer. With roots in traditional hip hop and scratch music, Mike spent his lifetime on beat production and a library of millions of sounds. Mike started out traditionally scratching with a turntable and has evolved to also include ableton and a moog.
Born in Oakland, California and raised in Fremont, Mike Boo was heavily influenced by the mobile DJ and turntablist scenes that flourished in the San Francisco Bay area during his childhood years. Back in the ’80s, his older cousin was a heavy metal head who allowed Mike to raid his record collection. At the tender age of 9, Mike would grab stacks of Iron Maiden and Dio records and spend hours playing them backwards on his Uncle’s stereo, listening for secret messages. This was one of Mike’s earliest experiences with vinyl experimentation. His childhood infatuation with records evolved into DJing with friends at high school dances and house parties. This was happening at the tail end of the Bay Area’s mobile DJ explosion. “I always wanted to get into making beats but never had enough money for samplers or beat machines,” explains Mike. “Then in 1990, I heard FM2.0 (Q-Bert, Mix Master Mike, Apollo) doing their turntable band thing on the radio. It was something like I never heard. Soon after, I saw them perform on a Bay Area TV show called ‘Home Turf’ and saw that it was all composed with turntables and scratching, and I was like ‘Damn, I wanna do that.’ Didn’t need any samplers, synths or big mixing boards. So one day I went out and bought a 4-track and started making tracks with turntables and have been doing it ever since.”
Representing the new wave of turntable music, Ned Hoddings was formed in 2002 after a cool vibe scratch session at D-Styles’ house. Uniting cross-continental members Toadstyle (Chicago), Excess (New York), and Ricci Rucker (San Jose) with Mike, Ned Hoddings’ first live performance was at the record release party for D-Styles’ Phantazmagorea, documented on the A Night at the Knitting Factory DVD. “The combination was obvious… it was like the Bermuda triangle of scratch music,” says Mike. Shortly thereafter, the members of Ned Hoddings accompanied D-Styles on the now-legendary Bastard Language Tour, which was also released as a DVD of the same name. After the tour, Mike conspired with D-Styles and Ricci Rucker, along with live drummer Ace, to form Gunkhole. “The science behind Gunkhole is no rulesŠ a ‘don’t give a fuck’ style of playing music, with turntables as the main element. We dive into funk, noise, ambient, free jazz and hardcore scratching” explains Mike. Gunkhole has toured extensively worldwide, including a month-long European tour in 2004, where an improvised set was performed each night in a different city.
Mike’s first foray into serious recording was Scetchbook: An Introduction To Scratch Music, released to worldwide acclaim in 2003. Produced with Ricci Rucker, Scetchbook was composed with nothing more than a turntable, a mixer, a multi-track recording program and an abundance of records. The album was fully composed by scratching individual instruments: kick drums, snares, percussion sounds, leads, bass lines, solos, etc. “We were just trying to prove a point: that other themes can be made with scratching by jumping from theme-to-theme.”
One year prior to the release of Scetchbook, Mike began work on Dunhill Drone Committee, still untitled, yet destined to become his solo debut opus. The third truly all-scratch album so far (after Phantazmagorea and Scetchbook), Dunhill Drone Committee is another landmark in the history of scratch composition. Half of the songs were recorded in an artist loft shared with Excess in Brooklyn, New York and the other half were completed at his parent’s house in Fremont. For Mike, the process was painstaking. At times, he would spend months browsing through hundreds of records to find the right sample for a track. He considers the tracks to be audio landscapes that document different times of his life. Mike explains, “I’m just concentrating on light and dark moods, and being able to hear these songs and have them trigger moments in my life within these past two years.” For example, track 7, “Here Are the Faxes You Requested” is about “how it sucks having to depend on music for your income, but at the same time refusing to return to the 9-to-5 lifestyle” while track 10, “Vibrations Transcend Space and Time” is “something to bump while I walk my dog.”
Dunhill Drone Committee invites the listener deep into the psyche of Mike Boo, and delivers ethereal compositional arrangements with virtuoso turntable musicianship. “A lot of people wonder why I don’t just play a sample. Well, if I just played it out, it would be hard to match the same grit of taking something from vinyl… I embrace the grit" (Last.fm, 2010).
Released Albums:
Mike Boo - Food Around The Corner
Mike Boo - Scetchbook with Ricci Rucker
Mike Boo - Soul Canvas
Mike Boo - Dunhill Drone Commitee
Mike Boo - Other Sounds
Reference:
(2010). Mike Boo. Last.fm. Retrieved from http://www.last.fm/music/Mike+Boo
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Born in Chicago, living in Iran from age 1 to 7, then moving to Los Angeles right after the Iranian revolution, Omid has seen a lot, and is influenced by it all. Growing up in Los Angeles, Omid got first turned on to Hip Hop by listening to KDAY, L.A.’s first all Hip Hop radio show. Learning early on that rapping or breakdancing was not for him, he did realize he had a fascination with the beats. In junior high, Omid started his first musical experiments, trying to create his own beats by using his only piece of equipment: a tape recorder. Using the record and pause buttons, plus his many tapes of jazz and soul that he taped off of local radio station KXLU, the first Omid beats were born. It wasn’t until freshman year in highschool that he borrowed a simple sampler, the Korg DSS-1, that he was able to make real beats. Though what started as a hobby was soon taken more serious.
Attending an open mic in Los Angeles called the “Goodlife” in the early 1990’s was a pivotal moment in Omid’s life. A safe haven for positive, artistic, and innovative poets and musicians, Omid was inspired to take his bedroom beat experiments more seriously, in order to be part of this thriving music scene. At the “Goodlife,” the artists were encouraged to be cutting edge and innovative, if they didn’t want to get the legendary “Please pass the mic!” reception. Already a scene with great producers, Omid knew right away would make him stand out: his roots. This inspired him to research and collect music from Iran and the Middle East, along with the usual jazz, funk, rock, etc. that is the root of hip hop. One day Omid showed a Goodlife producer named Ebow his music. Ebow liked what he heard and together they released a home-made beat tape that they sold only at the Goodlife, entitled “Beat Stampede.” Soon, Omid’s beats caught the ears of the local talent and the collaborations began.
In 1998, Omid produced “Beneath the Surface,” a 14 song compilation that brought many unknown talents from all over Los Angeles together for one album. This album was also the first official release of many who went on to be L.A. favorites. Omid produced all the songs, tailoring each beat for each dynamic MC, forging collaborations with artists that had never worked together before. Omid originally released the album by himself, and it was re-released in 1999 by Celestial Recordings. Although this album was done strictly for the love, it won Omid critical acclaim in such publications as The New York Times, Spin, and URB. “Beneath the Surface” gave Omid the courage to pursue music as a career full-time. This album was also one of the first, if not the first, to include Persian/Iranian samples in a “hip hop” record.
Since “Beneath the Surface”, Omid has produced 2 solo albums, “Distant Drummer” and “Monolith” (Mush Records), plus collaborated with countless cutting edge artists, such as the Beastie Boys, Aceyalone, Buck 65, Sach, 2mex/OMD, Scarub, Murs, Pigeon John, Slug, and many others. Movie soundtracks have also been a big influence on Omid, so it is not a surprise that his music has blended well with film (Last.fm, 2010).
Ricci Rucker aka The Ruckazoid is an American producer, DJ and composer. He designed Vestax’s “The Controller One”, the first turntable to be controlled with musical notes. Ricci pioneered the present scratch DJ scene through his albums, specialized DJ records and nonesuch technical skills. He’s also famous for his involvement in projects: Gunkhole (with D-Styles and Mike Boo) and Ned Hoddings (together with Excess, Mike Boo and Toadstyle) (Last.fm, 2010).
Los Angeles producer Nosaj Thing crafts stately, ethereal synth-based instrumental hip-hop, with influences that range from Boards of Canada and DJ Shadow to Danny Elfman and Erik Satie. An L.A. native, Jason Chung was inspired at an early age by the hip-hop radio stations that the bus driver would play on his way to elementary school, and particularly by the Beat Junkies' turntablism on Power 106. In high school, while delving into the sounds of drum'n'bass and the rave scene and playing quad toms in the school drum line, he figured out how to use his father's old PC to start programming beats of his own. Further along, Chung was motivated to move in more experimental directions by the D.I.Y. rock scene at L.A.'s underground venue The Smell, where he made his live debut as Nosaj Thing in 2004. Through online and in-person networking, on message boards and, eventually, at the more beat-oriented music spot Low End Theory, Chung came into contact with likeminded Angelenos including Flying Lotus, Nobody, Daedelus, and local legends (and personal heroes) like D-Styles and Daddy Kev. Following the self-released Views/Octopus EP in 2006 (whose track "Aquarium" was later used by rapper Kid Cudi as the basis of his "Man on the Moon"), he signed with Kev's Alpha Pup imprint for his full-length debut, Drift, in 2009. Chung has also contributed beats to MCs Busdriver and Nocando, and made remixes for Flying Lotus, Daedelus, Radiohead, and Smell staples Health (Hoffman, 2010).
Chris Alfaro is Free the Robots. The genre-defying artist pulls together heavy doses of traditional jazz, psych, electronic and hip-hop, with progressive melodies and devastating drums into a rich pot of sound. His techniques create harmony between genres with the blending of obscure samples with analog and digital compositions.
Based out of Santa Ana, CA, Free The Robots started as a side project by Alfaro in 2003 while also playing with different bands, producing MCs and DJing. Having worked with so many different styles of music, Free the Robots brought everything together under one roof, allowing further exploration. With the use of samples, Controllers, and other live instruments, Alfaro creates a balance between the sounds of the past, present and future.
Free the Robots has reached a worldwide audience since its humble beginnings and found its place among the top artists in this genre. With the constant development of Alfaro's sound and live show, Free the Robots Has shared the stage with the likes of Prefuse 73, Flying Lotus, the Glitch Mob, Afrika Bambaataa and more (Tumblr).
Hailing from Southern California, Dayeve Xienze, real name Dayeve Masangcay is a skilled underground hip hop and trip hop disc jockey, who loves to make sample-based music with a touch of acoustic guitar and keyboard, ever since 1998. His music can be considered abstract, experimental, distinctive, eccentric, weird and wonderful. It can be categorize as trip hop, underground hip hop, turntablism, breakbeats, electronica, cinematic, avant garde, film score, and space age.
This blog is dedicated to my Trip-Hop, Downtempo, Electronica, Dubstep, and Underground Hip-Hop Instrumental Addicts.In this blog, I will be spotlighting a beat innovator from around the world each day. I will also provide the artist's bio, album releases, music videos and more.
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