Yesterday’s revelatory discovery of Thao with the Get Down Stay Down withstanding, so far 2008 has not been overly kind when it comes to blessing me with albums that truly excite me. I’m not worried though since (as I explained yesterday) the year just started, and as the trickle of new music that’s already begun turns into a full-fledged flood I’m sure I’ll be veritably overwhelmed by an inundation of genuinely breathtaking records so numerous that I’ll be going crazy trying to find time to write about all of them. But in the meantime, business is still slow.
The bright side to this seeming dearth of dopeness though is that when I’m confronted by something that’s really worth getting excited about it stands out all the more. Such is the case with award-winning Dayton, Ohio-born turntablist Ruckus Roboticus and his debut LP Playing With Scratches. Self-described as “part turntable, half drum machine, all sex machine,” Ruckus has performed alongside Prince Paul, DJ Jazzy Jeff, DJ Premier, RJD2 and The Juan Maclean among others, lent his production skills to Nickelodeon, MTV, the Disney Channel, and LOGO TV, remixed Bloc Party, and been featured on Ninja Tune’s Solid Steel mix-show. His opus Playing With Scratches is a turntablist concept album that tells a narrative story about the birth, music-fueled life, death, and ultimate rebirth of a mythologized Ruckus, through sound collages built around scratches and samples culled largely from children’s records, which puts him in league with the likes of Cut Chemist, and the aforementioned Prince Paul and RJD2, when it comes to crafting instrumental Hip-Hop that’s all at once fun, funky and cognitive.
Conceptually the album Playing With Scratches reminds me most of is Company Flow’s instrumental outing Little Johnny from the Hospitul with a pinch of Prince Paul’s not-entirely instrumental solo debut Psychoanalysis: What is it? thrown in for good measure. But concepts and sonics are two altogether different things, so don’t expect Scratches to bear any discernible similarity to the former release. It shares more than a little bit in common with the latter though, not to mention Cut Chemist’s The Audience’s Listening and any number of downtempo records from labels like Ninja Tune and ESL. More than anything though it feels like a spiritual successor to my all-time favorite exhibition of Hip-Hop DJ skills (or turntablism if you will) ever committed to wax, Grandmaster Flash’s seminal “The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel.” Perhaps Ruckus is just good at sentimental heart-string-plucking, but the breaks and kiddie-record vocal bits on tracks like “Here We Go” bring me right back to my childhood when the sound of a North Dakota-born storyteller mixed over Chic’s “Good Times” pouring out of my boombox made me want nothing more than to be a real DJ and not just some kid sitting on his stoop “air scratching.”
Listen to “Here We Go”
-El Keter