Labels

Delicious Vinyl put out legendary hip-hop titles between 1989 and 1995, and the Los Angeles-based classic label’s catalog of West Coast party rock and conscious rap still gets play, on radio and at functions worldwide.

Their iconic catalog includes smash hits “Wild Thing” (on Tone-Lōc’s Lōc-ed After Dark) and “Bust a Move” (on Young MC’s Stone Cold Rhymin’), as well as groundbreaking albums by Masta Ace Incorporated, which married West Coast and East Coast sensibilities, and the sensational second album from Pharcyde, Labcabincalifornia, which was responsible for launching the career of producer extraordinaire J Dilla, who contributed to six songs including the immortal “Runnin’.”All this music connects the dots between the early Def Jam sound, hip-hop’s migration to the west coast, and micro-eras of sample-based production. You’ll find sounds analogous to Rick Rubin’s booming, stark production for Run-DMC; the Beastie Boys’ record-store-in-a-blender album Paul’s Boutique; and a smoothed-out, funky angle similar to groups like Hieroglyphics.

With Craft Recordings re-releasing key Delicious Vinyl albums in summer 2018, a bunch of that music is now back in circulation, waiting for your trip down memory lane or maybe first-time listening experience.

On April 10 of this year, Ben McOsker announced that Load Records—after nearly a quarter-century of contorting brains—is closing up shop. To describe the underground rock and noise label’s run as stellar is a gross understatement. Few imprints that document the fringes of sound have released even half the amount of genre-defining albums that McOsker and his partner in crime Laura Mullen have: Lightning Bolt’s Ride the Skies, Sightings’ Absolutes, The USA IS A Monster’s Tasheyana Compost, Yellow Swans’ At All Ends—the list goes on. These aren’t just amazing records, they’re seeds that filtered out into the world and helped spawn a global noise movement that came to a screeching climax in the ’00s. To put Load’s legacy in its proper context, you’d have to reach back to the glory years of Touch and Go or Amphetamine Reptile for an apt comparison—though, truth be told, neither label ever ventured as far out sonically as Load.Founded in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1993, Load served as the primary outlet for the unique mix of local greaser punks and art-school transplants inhabiting the city’s sprawling underground. Lightning Bolt are the most popular of the Providence outfits, but Load also released critical titles from Olneyville Sound System, Thee Hydrogen Terrors, Pleasurehorse, Kites, Prurient, and The Human Beast. McOsker and Mullen also looked far beyond the city’s limits: By the mid-’00s, they were unleashing music from artists as far flung as New York City (Sightings, Excepter, The USA IS A Monster), Ohio (Sword Heaven, Homostupids), San Francisco (Total Shutdown, The Hospitals), and Norway (Noxagt, Ultralyd).Beyond its consistently excellent output, Load pushed the limits of what an independent record label could get away with while continuing to remain commercially viable. Most imprints—however freaky, cacophonous, and anarchic—that get a taste of success tend to begin playing it safe, opting to release records that rarely venture beyond what’s already proven to be popular. But, possessing a deep love for trickster spirit-like unpredictability, Load actually got stranger the more units it sold. How else do you explain the existence of the Hawd Gankstuh Rappuhs MCs (Wid Ghatz)’s Wake Up and Smell the Piss, a descent into perverted, excrement-obsessed, lo-fi noise-hop that probably sold no more than a dozen copies? This record even confused Load’s most hardcore fans.But by unleashing such wildly uncommercial music alongside proven sellers like Lightning Bolt, Load helped give a much larger platform to genius musicians who are way too left field and individualistic for even the indie rock marketplace. For that, Load deserves some kind of cultural service award. Thank you, Ben and Laura!Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

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.

Like so many great record companies, Greensleeves was a record shop before it was a label. Founded in the London neighborhood of Shepherd’s Bush by former accountant Chris Cracknell and a DJ from Norfolk named Chris Sedgwick, the shop spent two years building up a reputation as the place to find the tastiest island imports. Then in 1977, its owners made the shift to producing music in the UK themselves. The Greensleeves label made its debut with a 7-inch by Dr. Alimantado, a singer and toaster who was already finding favor with the city’s safety-pinned tastemakers thanks to DJ Don Letts and his punk-reggae parties at The Roxy. The arrival of Alimantado’s album The Best Dressed Chicken in Town—a high watermark for producer Lee “Scratch” Perry and for reggae in general—established Greensleeves as the real deal.Of the British labels that were instrumental in building a global audience for Jamaican music, Island and Trojan arguably retain greater name-brand cachet, partially because they arrived on the scene earlier than Cracknell and Sedgwick did. But Greensleeves may be the most influential due to the sheer gravity and diversity of its releases, as well as its ability to spread the hottest trends far and wide. Even before the label began, the store had a predilection for emergent sounds that had yet to enter the mainstream, its clientele largely turning up their noses at Bob Marley’s big sellers in favor of Gregory Isaacs and Dennis Brown. Greensleeves’ quest for freshness would reap the greatest dividends when Cracknell and Sedgwick made a fortuitous alliance with Henry “Junjo” Lawes, the producer and label owner who became the standard-bearer for dancehall in the 1980s. The ensuing cavalcade of new stars—Eek-A-Mouse, Barrington Levy, Yellowman, Beenie Man, Ninjaman—would all become part of the Greensleeves story.Whereas the rock audiences that Island cultivated with Marley were wary of Jamaica’s increasingly electronic sounds, Greensleeves devotees developed an insatiable appetite for the new riddims that arrived in the wake of landmark releases like Wayne Smith’s “Under Me Sleng Teng” in 1986, Shaggy’s “Oh Carolina” in 1993, and Wayne Wonder’s “No Letting Go” in 2003. Another spin on producer Steven “Lenky” Marsden’s ubiquitous Diwali riddim—which yielded hits for Wonder, Elephant Man, and Bounty Killer too—Sean Paul’s “Get Busy” was another monster hit for the label.Acquired by New York’s VP Records in 2008 but still prominent and prolific, Greensleeves hits the big 40 this summer, celebrating with anniversary concerts in Paris, New York, and London. Given that their back catalog contains over 500 albums (with an impressively high ratio of winners), any salute to Greensleeves is bound to be a tip-of-the-iceberg kind of gesture. But surely a taste of riddim is better than no riddim at all.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

Psychedelic music emerged in the mid-60s as a mutant offspring of the British Invasion and American garage rock, but has since morphed into so many different forms that it is more accurate to describe it as a feeling than a sound. Be it the the brain-melting feedback of Jimi Hendrix or Ty Segall, the dreamy reveries of Spiritualized and Tame Impala, or the heady, head-nodding beats of Flying Lotus and J Dilla, psychedelica is hard to pin down—but you’ll know you’re hearing it when you feel your mind altering. Heres our curated guide to the best head music to help you chase the rush, including our genre-spanning psych playlist (at right) and links to past Dowsers mixes for even deeper trips.

INDIE PSYCHPsychedelia never dies, it just keeps getting weirder. Animal Collective threw down the gauntlet with 2004’s Sung Tongs, their childlike, free-spirited update of psych rock, and a generation of indie artists have taken up the challenge. From Deerhunters fearsome ambient punk to Zombys scrambled dubstep to Ariel Pinks wounded daydreams, the youngest generation continues to push music inward.Recommended Listening:Animal Collective’s Outer LimitsDreamy Noise Sounds: The Best of Kranky RecordsNew Tropics: The Modern Los Angeles Underground

PSYCH PUNKThe common myth about punk is that it formed in opposition to bloated 70s rock, and rejected Pink Floyd and anything associated with psychedelia. But the truth is that plenty of punks, such as restless hardcore purveyors Black Flag and volatile noiseniks the Butthole Surfers, not to mention punk-adjacent acts like the Jesus & Mary Chain and Dinosaur Jr., looked back to the ‘60s when deciding how to expand their sound and beguile their fans.Recommended Listening:When Punk Got WeirdPsychedelia in the ‘80sThe 50 Best Shoegaze Albums of All Time

PSYCH FOLKIn the beginning, psychedelic music was associated with guitar gods like Jimi Hendrix and waves of feedback. But that big bang was soon followed by generations of artists—from 60s Greenwich Village folkie Karen Dalton to Bert Jansch and his 70s British folk group Pentangle to modern dreamweavers like Devendra Banhart— who used acoustic guitars, pared-down arrangements, and dexterously plucked melodies to pull the listener into their headspace without the need for amplification.Recommended Listening:Way Past Pleasant: A Guide to Psychedelic FolkReligion, Rock, and LSD: A Brief History of Jesus Freaks

PSYCH ROCKWhen rock first got psychedelic in the 60s, the most obvious proponents were self-professed freaks like Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa. But nearly everywhere you looked, you could find someone trying to access their inner mind via some radical noise, from cult acts like Love and The Fugs to icons like The Beatles and Pink Floyd. Since then, every generation since has found their own way to look inside, from the Dream Syndicate in the ’80s, to Slowdive in the ’90s, to My Morning Jacket in the 21st century.Recommended Listening:Bad Trips: The Dark Side of the ‘60sSpace Rock: A Cosmic JourneyHow Psychedelia Reclaimed Modern Rock

PSYCH JAZZAt its mid-’60s moment of origin, psychedelia immediately found a natural host in jazz. After all, both are concerned with evoking a feeling and a mood, and following inspiration wherever it leads—from the spiritually searching compositions of Alice Coltrane to Mulatu Astatke’ slippery Latin-flavored explorations to Flying Lotus dedication to feeding brains with jazz-damaged trance whispers.Recommended Listening:The Black Experimental Music MixtapeChampions of Ethiopian GrooveThe Best of Brainfeeder

PSYCH FUNKPsychedelic music has traditionally been used as a way to explore the inner workings of your mind. But if you take off the headphones, its also a great way to explore your body on the dance floor. Soul, funk and R&B have a long tradition of making music that rocks the hips and the third eye at the same time, from Eddie Hazels righteous riffing on Funkadelic’s Cosmic Slop to Dâm-Funks alien synth-funk bangers.Recommended Listening:A Deeper Shade of Psych SoulThe Afrofuturist Impulse in MusicInto the Nite: Synth-Funk Fantasias

PSYCH RAPPsychedelic music has drifted into every form of music, and since any worthwhile hip-hop producer keeps their ears open, its only natural that it’s became part of the mix. Revered producers J Dilla and Madlib have made hip-hop tracks that oozed with so much mood and shimmer that they didnt even need MCs to rewire the listeners brain, while the genre’s heady offshoot, trip-hop, has been obliterating genre lines and listeners’ minds for more than two decades.Recommended Listening:Great (Post-Donuts) Instrumental Hip-Hop TracksBehind the Beats: Madlib and DillaBest Trip-Hop Tracks

PSYCH-TRONICAWhy settle for rocking minds and rocking bodies when you can do both at once? From the Chemical Brothers to Neon Indian to Boards of Canada, many of the most cutting-edge electronic-music producers spend equal amounts of time focussing on booming beats as well as keyboard lines, sine moans, and digital gurgles designed to tickle the mind. And if you need to rest after a night out, theres plenty of trippy ambient chillout tracks for that as well.Recommended Listening:Essential Acid House TraxThe Art of Psychedelic Disco-RockThe Best Electronic Shoegaze

As the lone R&B singer on the Top Dawg Entertainment roster, SZA has been the label’s go-to source for melodic contributions since she signed on in 2013. She’s loaned hooks and guest spots to most of her labelmates’ albums, appearing on Isaiah Rashad’s The Sun’s Tirade, ScHoolboy Q’s Blank Face LP, Ab-Soul’s These Days, and Jay Rock’s 90059.This month marks the release of CTRL, SZA’s long-awaited debut studio LP. While Rashad and fellow TDE rapper Kendrick Lamar return the favor with featured verses, CTRL demonstrates that SZA is more than capable of carrying a project on her own. If there were any doubts about SZA as a solo artist, she puts them to rest in the three minutes of album opener “Supermodel.” The track features skeletal instrumentation, allowing the full range of her voice to breathe over minimalist guitar and drums.The rest of the album’s production is similarly stripped down, with sparse samples accentuating SZA’s vocal work. “Broken Clocks” features a reverb-heavy loop of Toronto artists River Tiber and Daniel Caesar’s song “West.” “Anything” contains a subtle quote of Donna Summer’s “Spring Reprise” atop stuttering electronic drums. Even subtler still, SZA slips in a quick sample of Redman’s “Let’s Get Dirty” midway through the Kendrick Lamar-assisted, definitely dirty “Doves In The Wind.”SZA has been upfront about her eclectic influences. She’s indebted to powerful vocalists like Ella Fitzgerald and Lauryn Hill, who grew up near SZA’s hometown of Maplewood, New Jersey. She’s professed love for Purity Ring, who produced “God’s Reign,” an Ab-soul song on which SZA appears. And SZA’s music exudes a calming effect akin to that of Little Dragon, blending elements of other genres to push R&B into stranger and more interesting territory. Outside of her work with TDE, SZA has collaborated with several top names in R&B: She appeared on “Consideration,” the opening track of Rihanna’s ANTI, and she helped write “Feeling Myself,” Nicki Minaj’s collaborative track with Beyoncé.It must be difficult to be a singer on a label dominated by rappers, but a few years of background work seemed only to prime SZA for a stronger solo debut. Not every song on CTRL is perfect, but each is presented in SZA’s unique voice and refined style. With CTRL, SZA cements a place for herself not just as a collaborator or supporting act, but as a standalone artist.

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.

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.

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

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: