Lazer Bass' Ghosts on Tape gets it done in 2010
Looking back at the spectrum of music that was made in the last decade one can easily fall into the trap of lashing out at the seeming lack of creativity this decade’s artists exhibited. Bottom line is no one is going to say that the last nine years were a plethora of originality; where artists have really thrived in the last decade is in the realm of fusion. Which brings us to something that has been brewing in the waters with regards to underground instrumental hip-hop.
Eminent critics such as Sasha Frere-Jones and now Simon Reynolds have been publishing pieces that are spelling the end of hip-hop as a viable force of change and innovation with regards to popular music. These discussions are interesting insofar as they act as a general barometer of the perceived value of a genre’s relevance by critics. But in terms of the real ground floor dynamics of what is happening within the community they are mostly sterile.
The signal to noise ratio when talking about relevance, or influence within a movement I think here is important. There are artists who are making music within the hip-hop or post-Dilla realm that are worth taking note of. Not just because what they are making is “new” or “innovative” in the rawest definition of those terms but because there are people who can’t wait to dance to this music on the weekend, they eagerly await their releases when they come out, and who slowly are building communities around it.
We live in an era where sub-cultures affect the larger artistic processes in an indirect way; in other words, what happens at the amoeba stage of a musical scene has an effect that transforms larger entities, yes even ones as big as “pop music”. To think of the last 10 years in sweeping generalizations is a mistake; let’s appreciate new music via microsteps, shifts that fractally make changes within the whole.
Enter Ghosts on Tape: a SF producer who’s making electronic hip-hop that fuses Detroit techno, Chicago jack, electro bass with tropical-latin rhythms, and adds a little drum n bass and dubstep to round out the flavor. Sounds fucked up, doesn’t it? Well it is, but what he is doing is part of a larger context dubbed lazer bass (an execrable term) but useful as a shorthand for producers that are mining the post-Dan Deacon and Flying Lotus territory where glitch and groove meet in the center to produce some amazing mind melting and danceable tunes.
This is not IDM, folks. You will not be hearing this in your local airport lounge anytime soon, this is part of a larger direction that is concomitant with the gluttony of information that has been permeating the fabric of our lives for the last 5 years or so. This is a bird’s eye view into the future of what many electronic producers will be making in the next few years; one minute you are in a South Beach Miami club, the next in a dubstep cavern of echo and bass in London, the next in a hedonic den of Chicago and Detroit mechanization… only to end up in the abstract mentalism of 21st century hip-hop in Los Angeles. Welcome to 2010…
[Future Crunk Feature aka Lazer Bass]
Artists to check out within this genre:
[Megasoid]
