Beats, Zines and Demos

I’ve got an atypical post for you today about a label you’ve probably never heard of.  But if you stick with me all the way to the end, I think you’ll be looking them up.

We'll start off with Chemtrails, the loose collaboration of Australian producer Luke O'Farrell and his band/ housemates who recorded the beat tape Treason In the Sky back in 2013.  The band played psychedelic rock, but this is a strictly Hip-Hop endeavor: a mix of vinyl samples and live instrumentation made with an Akai MPC2500.  Only 25 copies of the original tape were released on an indie label called Skydreams, but now it's coming back via a newly remastered vinyl LP from his own label, Puff Down Records.

Now, regular readers may recall that I'm not traditionally predisposed to instrumental Hip-Hop, but I'm starting to come around to it.  After all, you can't calculate how much Raw Quartz you need to belt into your Manufacturer to maximize the Crystal Oscillator throughput of your Radio Control Unit line to make Pressure Conversion Tubes in Satisfactory with Kendrick Lamar ordering you to turn your TV off.  I've tried; you absolutely have to pause it.  But Treason In the Sky generates just the right amount of ambiance to get your pretend digital job done while still feeling engaged with what you're hearing.  Because this is definitely meant to be listened to, as opposed to a DJ battle tool or production kit LP.  These aren't just beats waiting for someone to rhyme over them and give them purpose.  Like, the titular horn loop of "Intergalactic War Horns" occupies the space for vocals; it would all sound too busy with an MC.

Puff Down also has its own print magazine, appropriately titled Puff Down.  They hooked me up with issues 2 and 3.  And then I actually got an email update from Hip Hop Enterprise as I was writing this telling me they were now carrying them.  It's a full 12" mag, 48 pages mostly in black and white with a few color inserts.  They feature record reviews, book reviews, and primarily interviews with underground artists like Has-Lo, DJ Rocksteady (of Trauma Center, whose material you might remember Dope Folks releasing early in their run) and DJ OG-S.  That last one makes sense, since they're working with him for their latest release...

OG-S is a name I recognize from doing mixes with labels like Heavy Jewelz, Lost Records (shame what happened there) and PQuest Revivals.  He and his partner Fatcap have been finding and releasing unreleased Hip-Hop demos for a little while now.  The main one that tripped my radar was the Joint Ventures CD a few years ago.  Well, their new release on Puff Down, Smoke Flavors, combines these ventures by mixing an impressive collection of never before (and probably never to be) released demos on both CD and cassette.  It's is a compilation of various artists, most very obscure (one is simply credited to "Unknown Artist Demo, 1992 California").  That's not to say that you shouldn't recognize any names on here, though.  We've got a tight untitled Powerule track from 1992 and a Delinquent Habits song dating years before they came out on LOUD Records.

But most of these names you're not gonna know.  I assume the reason these demos have been collected here and put out simply as a mix is because this is all the dope odds and ends they couldn't make official releases out of: groups you couldn't even track down to pay, who didn't put out enough music to fill a release on their own, and never managed to make the names for themselves to sell if they did.  But it's strong material that deserves to be heard, so this mix is a welcome catch-all of material, ranging from 1992-1996.  There's more New York stuff than anything else, but California, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Washington, Pennsylvania, Texas, Chicago, London and even The Bahamas are represented here.

Their bandcamp listing assures us that these were all preserved "to the best possible quality with the best equipment ... through professional distillation and extraction techniques."  In fact, OG-S goes into quite specific detail on his process and the exact equipment he uses in Puff Down issue 3.  The sound quality is still variant (a song by a crew called Homicide Division sounds particularly rough), but I think we can take it that this is as good as we could've ever hoped for.  Make no mistake though, this is a mix, not a compilation with separated songs and each song allowed to begin and end unsullied.  As one giant CD track, you can't skip to specific songs, and when you don't know who most of these artists are, and song titles aren't even listed, it takes a lot of patience if you want to suss out any one particular joint.  To isolate the Delinquent Habits, I had to work backwards from Cool Mike G song where he helpfully shouts his name in his hook (although, in retrospect, it should've been obvious from the production style which one was them).  At times I was questioning whether the scratching I was hearing was by the original artist or OG-S.  No, the way to enjoy this is like William Hurt said in The Big Chill, "sometimes you just have to let art flow over you:" one 60+ minute tidal wave of scrappy, raw 90s rap you've never heard before.

The Treason In the Sky record is pretty limited, too, to just 100 copies and comes in a picture cover.  It also includes a short 'zine about how the album was recorded, and a sticker of the original 2013 artwork.  The Smoke Flavors CD and tape are limited to 100 copies each, and come with a DJ OG-S sticker.  Treason is also available digitally, and has been since 2013, so you can check it out and see if you're taken with it.  But if you want to hear the demos, you've got to cop a physical copy.  And I strongly recommend it.