Labels

Founded in the late ’00s, Glasgow’s Optimo Music is the quintessential Scottish label, and that’s exactly the way JD Twitch wants it. The producer, DJ, promoter, remixer, and proud Scot has amassed a catalog that directly mirrors the freely flowing exchange between DIY, anything-goes rock and cutting-edge dance music that has long defined the country’s underground. After all, Scottish artists were some of the very first on the planet to (1) blend punk and discoid propulsion (see Fire Engines’ 1980 landmark “Get Up and Use Me”), (2) fold alt-rock into house/techno (Primal Scream, of course), and (3) pioneer ’00s dance rock (the crazy prescient Yummy Fur did it a decade ahead of schedule).Among the slew of vinyl Twitch released in 2016 (including those sides on the Optimo Trax and Optimo Music Disco Plate sub-labels), it’s on The Pussy Mothers’ The Number 1 EP, MR TC’s Surf and Destroy, and Junto Club’s Warm Me Up that these deliciously anarchic qualities are most in your face. Surf and Destroy is especially telling: the title track is a throbbing orgy of acid squelch, post-punk atmosphere, and psychedelic guitar wash.In contrast, these qualities become more subtle on those records that (at first blush, at least) tilt more toward orthodox dancefloor groove. A track like “In Turbine,” from Underspreche’s Invito Alla Danza Part 1, is minimal, electroacoustic drone rock (complete with warm organ hum) from a duo who are no strangers to pounding club jams. Noo is another revealing example: Their Optimo Music Disco Plate Five is all about 21st-century Italo awesomeness filtered through a scrappy, slacker basement vibe. Noo, it has to be noted, was founded by Christophe “Daze” Dasen and Sami Liuski, who hail from Switzerland and Finland respectively. You see, that’s a part of Twitch’s curatorial genius; he possesses a knack for teaming up with artists who, while they may not hail from the Scottish underground, create music that totally reflects its unique sensibility.Note: while my playlist is stacked with tracks from Optimo Music’s 2016 releases, listeners will also discover a handful of older gems. Truth be told, the label’s full catalog is never far from my turntable. For example, I probably jam Golden Teacher’s Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night — a boisterous collision of future punk, acid, and all manner of tribal funkery released in 2013 — at least once a month. Like most underground music from Scotland, this stuff simply doesn’t age.

Mere minutes before sitting down to write this post, Dais Records announced its plan to drop reissues of Psychic TV’s Pagan Day and Allegory & Self—stone-cold classics of ’80s psychedelia—in July. This is exactly the kind of record nerd–salivating news I’ve come to expect from label co-founders Ryan Martin and Gibby Miller (who started the operation in 2007). On what feels like a weekly basis nowadays, they revive some long-forgotten synth/ambient masterpiece or a vintage industrial jam that’s exquisitely dark and dreary. If you’ve never soaked up Annie Anxiety’s Soul Possession, a fringe art-pop album from the post-punk era, prepare to have your skull cap unscrewed and brain turned upside down. (Seriously—“Turkey Girl” manages to sound like outsider hip-hop recorded inside an intestinal tract.) Same goes for Hunting Lodge’s Will. It may have been forged in the raging fires of Michigan’s ’80s industrial scene, yet its hell-encrusted hypnotism, stuttering bass thuds, and minimalist dread is so damn prescient, it may as well have been recorded yesterday.Dais isn’t just an archival label, however. In the spring of 2017, the pair unleashed The Gag File, American noise artist Aaron Dilloway’s highly anticipated follow-up to 2011’s Modern Jester. Easily a contender for experimental album of the year, it employs murky, surrealist electronics and violently contorted samples to capture the fear and loathing suffusing our Trumplandia nightmare. In addition to Dilloway, the Dais catalog features churning brutality from hardcore-troublemakers-turned-EBM-fist-pumpers Youth Code, and Sightings, the most important noise-rock band of the 21st century.But not everything Dais puts out seeks to obliterate eardrums: on top of their taste for the ugly and abrasive, they have a deep love for the beautiful and sublime. To date, they’ve released two albums from Scout Paré-Phillips (pictured), a gothic singer/songwriter whose imposingly austere sound falls somewhere between folk music and art rock. At first blush, Drab Majesty’s gauzy and undulating darkwave feels worlds removed from Paré-Phillips’ guitar-driven theater, but when you sit down and spend some quality time with the former’s Careless and The Demonstration, it becomes apparent both explorers share a love for intricate songwriting with lyrics balancing the cryptic with the emotional. Quite honestly, most modern darkwave artists don’t even come close to touching Drab Majesty in terms of compositional originality. Then again, most modern experimental labels don’t even come close to touching Dais in terms of quality, so it’s a perfect fit.

The genius of Definitive Jux can be traced to an idea stolen from Ghostfaces song "The Grain," off 2000’s Supreme Clientele. Overtop a beloved breakbeat, Ghost and RZA forbid rappers from going against the grain of classic hip-hop tenets—while making a thoroughly surreal, topsy turvy masterpiece that went against the grain of classic hip-hop tenets. Each landmark indie-rap release from Def Jux was rooted in a similarly simple but rebellious idea: What if the most awe-inspiring rap gods of the ‘80s and ‘90s never conformed to industry demands and kept swimming farther away?Before Run the Jewels, El-Ps beats paid homage to Marley Marl, Ced-Gee, Paul C, and the Bomb Squad, the most revered knob turners in 80s rap; he just eschewed James Brown samples for prog guitars and John Carpenter synths. Aesop Rock followed his Long Island mentors De La Soul, the original distorters of vocab, by replacing daisies with art-house darts laced in code that never relented. RJD2 imagined early DJ Shadow albums not shaded strictly gray. Mr. Lif lifted the cool monotone delivery of Guru with the fiery political fury of Public Enemy. C Rayz Walz was the only son of Ol Dirty Bastard and Cappadonna. Murs and 9th Wonder made a one MC/one producer album in the golden-age vein of Gangstarr and Pete Rock & CL Smooth. Hangar 18 was Souls of Mischief in a drunken cypher outside Fat Beats.Oddly, Def Jux were loathed by the purist rappers and conservative hip-hop consumers who gobbled up all the classic aesthetics that the Jukies were reimagining in the era of iPods, 9/11, and the booming market of internet rap. But no other collective of rappers and producers soundtracked the dread and fear of the early 2000s, all the while staying true to their roots of graffiti, b-boy-friendly beats, and telling the government and other MCs alike to kiss their ass.But 10 years since the one-two punch of El-Ps Ill Sleep When Youre Dead and Aesop Rocks None Shall Pass, and seven years after the label shut its doors with Camu Taos posthumous 2010 album King of Hearts, you can still see the influence of the acclaimed New York based indie-rap label that was sued by Def Jam before they even dropped their first full length release. On 2014’s So It Goes, RATKING emerged as the logical extension of Cannibal Ox, young dwellers of a post-apocalyptic New York where gentrification did more damage than Giuliani. Milo, Elucid and billy woods have continued the ethos of Jux for Bandcamp kids who missed the original dynastic run. Danny Brown wrote Aesop Rock lyrics by hand while in jail. Camu Tao begat his fellow hometown off-kilter crooner Kid Cudi. Party Fun Action Committee wrote the blueprint for The Lonely Island. RJD2 soundtracked Mad Men and dozens of commercials. Adult Swim head honcho Jason Demarcos love for the label led to the union of El-P and Killer Mike. And Cage helped us all see how truly insane Shia LeBouf could be.Since Def Jux shut down at the dawn of the streaming age, much of its back catalog isn’t available on Spotify—however, a handful of its key releases have surfaced thanks to reissues. We’ve collected the best tracks from those albums in the playlist above, and mixed them with a selection of cuts from the contemporary hip-hop artists they’ve inspired. And for a deeper dive into the Def Jux discography, check this YouTube playlist:

One of the beauties of living in an era of hyper-technology is that it’s never been easier to dumpster dive through the musical annals of history for hidden treasure. But while anyone can go mining through YouTube for gold, it takes a special breed to wade through the mysterious waters of reissues. Hunting down long-lost artists and restoring their precious masters to life is a tricky business, but label Light In The Attic has led the reissue revolution with panache since setting up shop in Seattle in 2002.Perhaps the most interesting quality of Light In The Attic’s reissues is the spiritual kinship that so many of their artists share. LITA’s records have a folkish, proletariat quality to them, not only because so many of their releases fall under the Americana banner, but also in the way they expose the struggles of everyday artists who never truly caught the spotlight—or in some cases, purposely avoided it. Whether it’s in the fiery political incantations of The Last Poets, the indigenous songwriters populating the Native North America compilation, or the honky-tonk surrealism of Lee Hazlewood, Light In The Attic searches for humanity in the under-exposed and reveals the alternate histories of our musical traditions that have been happening all along, right under our noses.Though tackling a catalog as wide and diverse as theirs is an unruly challenge, this playlist highlights some of the wonderful music that Light In The Attic has brought to our attention over the years, and also illustrates the spirit that connects these forgotten visions. Take a listen, and remember that sometimes the greatest voices are those least heard.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

This post is part of our Psych 101 program, an in-depth, 14-part series that looks at the impact of psychedelia on modern music. Want to sign up to receive the other installments in your inbox? Go here. Already signed up and enjoying it? Help us get the word out by sharing it on Facebook, Twitter or just sending your friends this link. Theyll thank you. We thank you.Los Angeles’ beat scene was always loose by design. Though it had a very specific and physical home—Low End Theory, a club night that still happens every Wednesday at The Airliner in L.A.—the music is more mercurial, with innumerable sub-genres flourishing and swiftly fading. The architects of the scene understood that tying themselves to any one sound meant desertion when the wave inevitably crashed. So, the music was omnivorous, encompassing rap, IDM, psychedelia, turntablism, dance music, trap, jazz, ambient, trip-hop, and spiritual music.The resulting milieu produced a body of work that is nearly unparalleled in hip-hop and modern electronic music, and you can hear the beat scene’s influence in everyone from Thom Yorke and Erykah Badu to Odd Future, Kendrick Lamar,Drake, and Kid Cudi. It transformed L.A. from an electronic-music backwater to a hub of indigenous electronic music culture. And while even casual electronic music fans know its commercial lodestars—Flying Lotus, Thundercat, TOKiMONSTA, Daedelus, et al.—the scene has a deep bench, a psychedelic assortment of mad scientists, Afrofuturists, and avant garde tinkerers that seem like characters ripped out of comic books.The Dowsers has partnered up with The Passion of the Weiss to present an exhaustive look at this scene—complete with an accompanying playlist of definitive tracks. Head here to check out their list of the Top 20 albums, and check out our remix of their list below, which focuses on the 10 artists who defined the movement.

AN ORIGIN STORY, OF SORTSNearly 10 years removed from its release, Flying Lotus’ 2008 album Los Angeles still feels like an anomaly. Most L.A. music evokes sunshine, but FlyLo used techno, bass music, jazz, and hip-hop to sketch a picture of stoned weirdoes marauding through the city’s endless expanse. African percussion collided with IDM sub-frequencies, and Moog licks bounced off record static, conjuring strange, shamanistic imagery. It’s unsurprising that its Afrofuturist grit earned full-throated endorsements from the electronic-music press; the “black Aphex Twin” headlines wrote themselves.And yet despite its electronic bona fides, Los Angeles is hip-hop to the core. Released during a half-decade death spiral of rap’s ’90s generation, and during the South’s ringtone rap phase, Los Angeles didn’t fit. What it did, however, was inspire misfits, both global and local. The irreverent beat science of Odd Future pointed directly to Los Angeles, while Detroit’s Danny Brown calculated what it’d take to rap over music this weird. Soon, an entire scene of blunted beatmakers sprung up both around Low End Theory (Lotus’ performance space of choice) and the internet (where his music was consumed). We’re a decade removed from cloud rap, half a decade from Yeezus, and two years from Future’s DS2, and while we don’t know for sure if Clams Casino, Kanye, or Future heard Los Angeles, the album was the butterfly whose wings indirectly started a rap hurricane where harsh electronic productions became an acceptable canvas over which to brag about sexcapades and Gucci brand footwear.Listen to key tracks from Los Angeles alongside the music that inspired it:

INTO A DARK SILENCENosaj Thing was one of the earliest members of the beat scene, but where his contemporaries tended to produce more fleshed-out sounds, often with a heavy hip-hop influence, Nosaj Thing created a canvas shaded as much by silence as by noise. On his debut album, 2009’s Drift, the beats are dark and exploratory, and, while he couldnt have known it at the time, it has a lot in common with "the drift" of Guillermo del Toros Pacific Rim. In both instances, the drift is a process by which two active participants bond over synchronized brain waves to form a more perfect whole. While del Toro had a specific, mechanical process in mind, Nosaj Thing found a far more organic approach, realizing that (re)creation wasn’t about moving away from the original source as much as it was about moving toward a new one.Listen to key tracks from Drift alongside the music that inspired it:

THE WANDERERGonjasufi has the voice of a man who’s been through the gutter and back. An ancient, rusted-out croon, it’s by turns manic and tender, evoking many days lost in the wilderness, and many more spent re-aligning the chakras. His 2010 release, A Sufi and a Killer, feels like an epic trek, as producers Gaslamp Killer, Mainframe, and Flying Lotus sample a global list of artists to forge soulful, psychedelic beats. The vibe is dirty, and the thunder and rain that comes in at the tail end of “Love of Reign” makes the voyage that much more unnerving. Still, Sufi navigates the landscape with confidence, unleashing a crisp poetry that lays his contradictions bare in an allegorical track about a lion that wishes he were a sheep. When the singer finally finds redemption in “Made”—whose lyrics find a parallel between the coming of spring and the arrival of a paycheck—his voice is feather-light and full of relief.Listen to key tracks from A Sufi and a Killer alongside the music that inspired it:

HEARING IS BELIEVINGTo see The Gaslamp Killer is to believe in The Gaslamp Killer. The Low End Theory co-founder/resident DJ’s wide-ranging sets reside on the brink of chaos, mixing hip-hop, rock, electronic, and all points in between. On stage, he resembles the waving, inflatable man outside of a car dealership, yet the rhythmic flailing isn’t a substitute for pyrotechnics or pre-planned drops. It’s genuine, and he connects without a shred of self-consciousness, guiding audiences with shamanistic conviction.His Brainfeeder debut, 2012’s Breakthrough, captures the intimate, heartfelt lunacy of his live sets. It is the circadian rhythm compressed, shuttling you at breakneck speed from a psychedelic midnight to lucid dawn. “Holy Mt Washington” (with Computer Jay) tempers eviscerating low-end bounce with buoyant, Morricone-inspired whistling. “Peasants, Cripples, & Retards” (with Samiyam) moves from industrial, intergalactic funk to Jamaican dub. The emotive plucking of the yiali tambur by Jogger’s Amir Yaghmai on “Nissim” is backed by Gaslamp’s breakbeat barrage. It remains the standout, a reminder that not every song from the beat scene needed to rattle your body in order to touch your soul.

THE AFROCENTRIC FROM ALPHA CENTAURIRas G is the beat scene’s answer to Sun Ra. His music is an attempt to commune with the constellations, drawing equally from the electronic and analogue. His 2008 album, Brotha From Anotha Planet, is prime headphone listening, a solitary exploration of the soul in twilight hours. Ras G’s willingness to pull back between banging beats, to tie everything together with these oddly comforting intergalactic sound collages, is brilliant. It’s in these moments that we reflect, reminding ourselves of that a celestial experience is visceral as well as cerebral, and attempt to find our place in the universe.

THE FUTURE AT 90 BPMTeebs’ balancing act between subtly and bombast not only served as the M.O. for his 2010 debut, Ardour, but as a mission statement for the beat scene. While early Los Angeles electro used the sparseness of drum machines to rock the party, and DJ Shadow pushed crate digging to its first extremes, Teebs pulls both traditions toward the center, balancing the psychedelic quality of the music with a palpable sonic immediacy. It’s hard to disassociate the somatic contrast between weight and weightlessness from New Yorker Teebs’ adopted sunshine state. Rick Rubin’s beats were born of boomboxes on trains, Detroit techno’s future jazz filled the mechanical void left by shut-down factories, and Ardour was brought to you by dispensary-bought weed cookies and 90 bpm hip-hop records.

AN ALCHEMYShlohmo (a.k.a. Henry Laufer) has a gift for building tension by mining the space between wonder and terror. On 2011’s Bad Vibes, his intricate, skeletal rhythms invite close inspection, and the natural sounds and white noise textures have all the warmth of a down comforter, but the booby-trapped funk of “Just Us”—opening on a thread of light, blurpy synths and then boiling over in a wash of phantom electronics—makes you question just how safe this world really is. Laufer said that he was going through a rough patch when making this album, yet Bad Vibes reflects deeper, more ingrained burdens. Some are consumed by pain, fear, and insecurity, but Shlohmo transformed it into something beautiful.

RAZOR BLADE BEATSIf you stumbled into Low End Theory between 2008 and 2012, you felt Samiyam’s bass hit you so hard that it felt like you had a razor blade in your throat. The Ann Arbor transplant twisted synths into shrapnel, while his drums signaled an imminent sonic destruction. Samiyam’s 2011 release, Sam Baker’s Album, is an instrumental suite that is alternately gorgeous and gargoyle-heavy. Its innately infused with Samiyams grit and filth, and plucks diamonds from dirt, stars in soot, breathing artesian oxygen and then descending into a valley of smog. It reminds you that the beat scene was as far away from Hollywood as it was Hanoi.

JAZZ MUTATIONSThe influence of jazz on the beat scene is more spiritual than aesthetic. Before Kamasi Washington (who came later, and orbited the periphery), the scene produced only one true jazz artist —the young piano prodigy Austin Peralta. Peralta had a reputation as a live performer, and the recordings that have surfaced since his 2012 passing have taken on a near-mythical dimension. They are full of exuberance and wonder, with every chord revealing new avenues of sound. This willingness to push boundaries provides a through-line that connects Peralta to the larger beat scene.But experimentation is hollow without a handle on the fundamentals, and while Peralta’s live sets reached the farthest edges, his most important studio work, Endless Planets, is comparatively conservative. The piano and rhythm section do the bulk of the work, staying comfortably in pocket, with only a sparse smattering of electronics and a few ambient flourishes revealing the album’s progressive modernity. Endless Planets’ relatively reserved approach provides a launching pad for Peralta’s mutations, and established a link between the beat scene and a larger jazz tradition.

8-BIT BOOM RAPThough producer Jonwayne declares that Nintendo DS game Animal Crossing gave him the only semblance of structure in his life—understandable for a guy who used to work at Gamestop—he is first and foremost a hip-hop aficionado. He established his crate-digging bonafides by exalting criminally overlooked Pasadena crew Mad Kap, and he’s a devout follower of the cult of Busta. Still, it’s remarkable how nicely Jonwayne’s two obsessions dovetailed on his 2011 debut, Bowser. The eerie, descending keyboards of “Bowser I (Sigma Head)” evoke a King Koopa rampaging like Ice Cube’s dad in “Down for Whatever,” drunk and threatening to turn the party out, while “Beady Bablo”’s woozy, chiptune interpolation of “Freek-A-Leek” proves that Petey Pablo could have a second career stealing princesses from castles.SaveSaveSaveSave

A modern-day punk label if there ever was one, Sacred Bones has been doing serious work since forming in Brooklyn in 2007, not only to unearth strange new sounds bubbling from the underground, but to reframe the very concept of what punk music is in the 21st century. They may adhere to a very rigid aesthetic framework (almost all their releases come with the full tracklist and recording details listed right there on the cover, along with their trademark ouroboros), but in terms of sound they couldn’t be a harder collective to pin down. Ghostly folk balladeers like Marissa Nadler and Amen Dunes take a seat next to ear-bleeding noise concoctions from Pharmakon and Pop. 1280, while rootsy indie rockers like The Men and Case Studies saddle up with mind-altering musical works from cult film directors like David Lynch and John Carpenter. It’s a strange scene—a sort of neo-goth coalescence of various genres and styles that come together in the name of worshiping the dark god of underground music.Even with such a far-reaching catalog of artists calling the label home, it’s not difficult to get into the zone with Sacred Bones’ distinct brand of homegrown black magic. Hit play to take our tour of the label’s greatest musical offerings, and see just how many different ways punk music can sound today.

Click here to subscribe to the Spotify playlist.In an era where singles carry the industry, and albums are just collected singles, and mixtapes are albums, TDE in 2016 approached their releases like Def Jam in 1998 — stuffing them to the gills. Each album featured the patented TDE approach of Two Songs For One, pioneered on Kendricks "Sing About Me, Im Dying of Thirst, the 12-minute capper on Good Kid, Maad City and followed by the seven-minute "Prescription/Oxymoron" on Schoolboy Qs Oxymoron. Check the track totals and album lengths this year:Ab-Soul, Do What Thou Wilt.: 16 songs, 77 minutesIsaiah Rashad, The Song’s Tirade: 17 songs, 63 minutesSchoolboy Q, Blank Face: 17 songs, 72 minutesKendrick Lamar, untitled unmastered: 8 songs, 34 minutesHaving the patience to make it past 10-12 songs in one sitting for any music fan is trying. TDEs position is its better to have more and not need it than to not have enough. Long gone are the days of GZAs philosophy of making albums "brief son, half short and twice as strong.” Blank Face would be a top 3 album if it closed with the title track, and Ab-Souls fascination with Lupe and Eminem would be better served in under 40 minutes.This would be a deterrent if not for the artists themselves choosing to eschew the pop charts they so clearly had their eyes on in the aftermath of Kendricks breakthrough Good Kid four years ago. Schoolboys Blank Face was a popcorn movie of an album, action-packed, fun, violent, and full of beloved heroes like Tha Dogg Pound, Jadakiss, and E-40. Isaiah Rashads The Suns Tirade was breezy and introspective, more than capable of soundtracking cookouts for the next 5 years. Ab-Soul doubled down on his Conspiracy Brother impulses on his third album Do What Thou Wilt, becoming the millennial Ras Kass in the process. And Kendricks untitled unmastered, while sloppy in parts, was an interesting bookend to Pimp a Butterfly — 34 minutes of outtakes and "How the hell was THAT not a single?" moments jampacked into 8 songs.This playlist is the easiest way to enjoy the high points from TDEs best overall year top to bottom without having to take on too much Netflix truther documentary talk from Ab-Soul, nihilistic glee from Schoolboy, unfinished jazzy ruminations from Kendrick, or mumble mouthed charm from Isaiah.

Of Montreal may be nearly two decades removed from their days as Elephant 6 upstarts, yet the collective’s unmistakable blend of eccentric DIY ethos and ’60s pop hooks continues to haunt the Georgia group’s music — including 2016’s Innocence Reaches. The same holds true for indie rock as a whole. Inspect the genre’s rank and file and the dreamily melodic flavors of Neutral Milk Hotel, Olivia Tremor Control, The Apples in Stereo, and all their blissed out pals continue to exert a powerful influence. In addition to spotlighting key tracks from Elephant’s 6’s charter members, our playlist ropes in notable outliers such as neo-psych brats The Essex Green and the utterly indescribable A Hawk and a Hacksaw.

There is something special about Kranky Records. Amidst a sea of labels that release a consistent bill of fare, Kranky puts out everything from avant-garde electronic and ambient to noisy dream pop, going out of their way to shed light on original and imaginative voices. Since its founding in Chicago in 1993, Kranky has released albums for such visionary artists as Deerhunter, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Tim Hecker, and more. In her time on the label, Liz Harris (Grouper, Mirrorring) has developed a wholly unique and prismatic aesthetic, while Bradfox Cox (Deerhunter, Atlas Sound) took his bedroom pop project to its post-punk and shoegaze fruition. With hazy synths, towering guitars, impressionistic vocals, and a decidedly experimental sensibility, Kranky Records really does do it all. -- Adam Rothbarth

It’s difficult to overstate how much DFA meant to modern indie music. When the label first appeared in the early aughts, many in the Pitchfork crowd were afraid of dance music, but bands like LCD Soundsystem and Rapture made electronic music hip again for a certain audience. It was post-internet music, meaning that there was a premium put on pastiche and obscurity; and the music referenced everything from Krautrock to disco. But the music wasn’t stale or overly cerebral; it rocked, thumped and sometimes bumped. Elliot Sharp, from RBMA, places the tracks in chronological order, and it’s interesting to hear the collective sound develop and mature over the years. There seems to be an over-reliance on remixes, and some of the labels biggest names are not on here, but every track is great, and it’s a decent enough place to start.