The Needle Drop

beats

Surock - Suck My Disk

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Music production has come a long way since the 80s, and it's sometimes hard to imagine how so many beloved joints were produced on such rudimentary equipment. Case in point: The SP-1200. Of course, this drum machine and sampler that was more advanced than the hardware that preceded it, but it's funny to think this thing had only about ten seconds of sampling time at its disposal. These days, we can sample anything for as long as we'd like. The limitations seem to be endless, and advancements like this tend to make us forget what things were like prior. Despite obvious limitations, the buttons on the SP-1200 were smashed by too many legendary producers to name, and its abilities were put to use in a variety of different genres, too.

This is how all of this is relevant: What's been embedded above is a new album of instrumentals from up-and-coming producer Surock, and he stuck faithfully to the 1200 for every single track here. As a result, the beats here have a warm, gritty tone. The dude's sampling is tight as well, and there's a variety of vibes that come across in these beats, too. Give 'em a stream, and enjoy!

Bun/Delofi - Colors Tape/Winter Tape Split

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Brooklyn label Dirty Tapes certainly lives up to its name with its latest split release between Japanese electronic music producer Bun (Fumitake Tamura) and Cleveland experimental beatmaker Delofi. The instrumentals across the Colors and Winter tapes are serene, chilled, and are lent an additional avant-garde edge by their being caked in all sorts of sweet analog grime. The tapes can be streamed and ordered (on cassette, naturally) above via Dirty Tapes' bandcamp page. Happy listening!

Madegg - Bluu Form

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Some spacey, ear-tingling beatmusic from this collection of Madegg tracks, Bluu Form. Give it a stream and relax. Allow your eyes to roll into the back of your head as you drift off into a sonically psychedelic coma.

Hanz- A Made Bear At Peace

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Electronic producer Hanz is dishing out beats that incorporate samples in a startlingly seamless way adding to his already monstrous and unique sound.

Hanz has definitely made a name for himself in my eyes with these productions. They are so unlike anything I have ever heard in this genre and the vast array of sounds he is able to cover is nearly incomprehensible for me and my ears. These are some truly creative and appealing productions that I hope an equally talented MC gets behind and does something special with. There is a great amount of variety from song to song yet it doesn't fall into the territory of some tracks being far to dense for their own good, each has a cohesive theme that rides throughout all of the layering and progressive switches. This is truly an innovative beat maker at his best and the scary thing is he could still improve from here.

Lorn- "Diamond" & "Weigh Me Down"

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Streaming below are two videos from the new Lorn album, Ask the Dust. The electronic music producer's sophomore effort is out now via Ninja Tune. I talked about this album a bit on a Y U NO REVIEW segment, saying that I was impressed with the improved production from Lorn on this new release. Ask the Dust is definitely a step up in texture, and combines sounds both beautiful and rough for a really nice atmosphere. My qualms with the album, though, sat mostly with the sequencing of the rhythms and synths on the track, which I thought could have been a bit more detailed.

While I still feel that way to an extent, I'm pretty impressed with the two videos available below, and I have to admit the sounds I already thought were great are starting to fill in the enjoyment gaps left by the lack of, well, I guess, complexity, in some of these instrumentals.

To get back to the videos at hand, both are visually appealing, with one making more of a social statement than the other. Of course, I'm referring to the very dark, depressing "Weigh Me Down," which takes a shot at cookie-cutter culture. On the other side of the spectrum is "Diamond," which feels way more abstract, surreal, and dreamlike in its visual content.

Both feature beautiful animations that have a bit of 8-bit chic to them. Boss stuff!