Looking back at the first month and a half of Blogarhythms of 2008 I started to feel like maybe I’d been fronting on instrumental beats, a genre I’d regularly featured throughout the past year. A quick glance at my music library, particularly the most recent additions, was all I needed to see why this is the case… I don’t really have any right now! Or at least I only have a few (maybe three at best?) in my stacks that I haven’t already bigged up, that are even remotely recent, or that are of notable quality.
Los Angeles-based producer Thomas Wilson, better known as Take, somehow manages to have not one but two releases — his recent full-length Earthtones & Concrete and even-more-recent Plus Ultra EP — occupying space on that very short list. Although I guess he’s just that prolific since he’s actually about to put out another record, The Dirty Decibels of Thomas Two Thousand on the Netherlands-based Eat Concrete label (who plan to release another Take LP this Summer… whew), that I’d like to own as well and would probably be writing about right now if I did.
This post isn’t about records I don’t have though, so let me tell you a little something about the ones I do.
At 18 tracks in length I thought Earthtones & Concrete was a bit of a daunting listen when I copped it towards the end of ‘07. This feeling was only compounded by Take’s penchant for indulging in disjointed, abstract arrangements and excursions into stripped-down trance-like ambient soundscapes influenced by Jazz and psychedelic music. However, these detours into pretty knob-twiddling and atmospheric drone came sandwiched between hard-knocking boom-clap beats, adorned with the low-end gurgle, sawtooth buzz, sine-wave hum, chirp, zap, beep & sweep of effected synths, and the chopped-up tones of acoustic guitars, vibes, strings & other assorted instruments. And even when his tracks feature obvious vocals, such as “Walk Away” with singer Gaby Hernandez and “Dreamsuite” with emcee Dutch Massive, the contributions of his collaborators seem like another instrument for Take to manipulate rather than overshadowing the compositions as a whole.
Take “Walk Away” feat. Gaby Hernandez
The decidedly shorter Plus Ultra EP is built around revised versions of a few songs from Earthtones & Concrete. Most notable of these are the remixes of interlude-length album tracks “Golden Gate Reflections” and “You High” by Ras G. and Daedelus which transform the formerly stripped down tracks into a stuttery bass monster and a glitchy Micro-House groover respectively. And the new tracks like Take’s collaboration with Domu, a slumping downtempo Nu Jazz/Broken Beat-ish joint called “Like a Drum,” his druggy Psyche-Hop team-up with previous Blogarhythm featuree Lukid “Navigators,” and the uptempo, Electro-influenced stomper “Bee Sting” are all the more reason to peep the EP.
Take “Like a Drum” with Domu
Hopefully the coming months will find my collection of instrumental listening material bolstered by some new and exciting releases, and not just that new Take record either!
-El Keter
