This latest offering by East Bay beat-meister and Anticon Records producer Odd Nosdam is a soundtrack to a film with regard to the ruff-tuff art of skateboarding, This Is My Element. It's mutant hip-hop, the kind of Music for Films that Brian Eno might've conjured had he grown up in the East Bay in the 1990s instead of '60s/'70s England.
"Top Rank" has idyllic, then pensive fragments of melody ebbing-and-flowing over an eerie dublike metallic/industrial rhythm matrix. "Root Bark" has a sweetly minimalist (think Philip Glass, Terry Riley) melody undulating over a crisp, reggae-inflected pulse, while "One for Dallas" takes a mariachi band into Mayan dub-land, driven by what sounds like (it's anybody's guess) an exultant slide guitar riff. Then imagine German electronica pioneers Cluster absorbing hip-hop cadences, and you might well conceive "Wig Smasher."
Oakland is the future and the future is now, baby. (Anticon)
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