If you’ve been paying attention to the goings-on here, you know I’ve made it a habit to spotlight instrumental beats as often as warranted. And while this isn’t exactly another post where I do that (don’t worry, another one is coming sooner or later), it is a post about drum-oriented instrumental music. It’s just that this instrumental music is, well, a little different. It’s not really about samples, or loops. It’s not even about drum machines or synthesizers per-se, even though those instruments do show up. No, these records were made by groups of musicians fiddling around with more traditional instruments.
A trio comprised of experimental Electronica producer and multi-instrumentalist Kieran Hebden (also known as Fourtet), multi-instrumentalist and singer Adem Ilhan (who also records, simply-enough, as Adem), and drummer Sam Jeffers, Fridge are a so-called Post-Rock band who make “far-out” jams embracing the traditions of avant-garde Jazz, Krautrock, Ambient, and Psychedelic music. The tracks on their newest album The Sun can, from song-to-song, be chaotic and cacophonous, rhythmic and melodic, or droney to the point of being trance-inducing. But it’s the tracks where they “give the drummer some,” like the nearly totally percussion-based breakbeat track “The Sun,” and the one-minute-it’s-noisy the-next-minute-it’s-dreamy, drum-fill-extravaganza “Oram,” that give the record it’s backbone.
When Dan Bitney, John Herndon, and John McEntire, three members of another Post-Rock collective called Tortoise decide to “give the drummer” some, their record is backbone, and nothing but. I guess that’s why they called their drum-dominated side-project for the Stones Throw label Bumps, and let the album itself bear the same moniker. If you’re a record-digger, breakbeat-fiend, or sample-squirrel who’s ever copped an album for a dope one-or-two bar break only to think “albums like this would be so much hotter if they were nothing but breaks,” then you need Bumps in your life. It’s 23 tracks and a little over a-half-hour’s worth of nothing but booming kicks, snapping snares, sizzling hi-hats, splashy cymbal crashes, and ill fills. Most cuts sound like the breaks one might find on old Soul and Funk 45s (”Crass Jenny”), others are bigger and more complicated, like the drum-tracks pilfered from Rock and Psyche records (”Can You See”), a couple add a little electronic flair (”Tryplemead Gosrmatch”), and at least one (”Biotic Discussion”) sounds straight off a Post-Punk or early Funk-Punk record from back in the day.
I’ve heard that during their formative years the members of Tortoise fancied themselves a “rhythm section for hire” in the spirit of the house-bands and mercenary-musicians responsible for so many old Soul, Funk and Reggae sessions. So I can totally see why supplying basic rhythm tracks to the rank-and-file of the “Hip-Hop generation,” whose own musical sensibilities are largely informed by that era, might appeal to them. And though theirs is a different sort of record, I’m sure Fridge’s influences stem from an interest in the wax offspring of the progenitors of so much musical experimentalism, which, coincidentally, also tend to find homes in the crates of beat-conscious, and wax-savvy Hip-Hop schooled crate-diggers.
So the cycle revolves, just like a record.
-El Keter
