Leonard Dstroy - Higher Vibrations (2010)

If you've been listening to our mixtapes, you may have heard a song by Deep Thinkers, a high-energy, freaked out turntable heavy, instrumental hip-hop piece called The Technicolor B-Boy Slideshow. Now, meet the producer. Kansas City native Kyle Dykes, here under the moniker of Leonard Dstroy, continues his frantic, jumpy, maximalist hip-hop beats to an incredible degree.

And maximalist is certainly a perfect word for what's included here. In Deep Thinkers, he, with the compliment of emcee "Brother of Moses" (Aaron Sutton, who makes a brief appearance on this album), made much more subtle arrangements. Aside from the previously mentioned Technicolor B-Boy... and Kiss The Sky the album consisted of, relatively, standard beats. It had styles of jungle and ambient music mixing it's abundant samples, but they were still categorically "hip-hop" beats. Here, it's a distruction of it. It may start as a hip-hop beat, at the core there may be a standard beat underlying the song, but he jams a myriad of crashes and crunches and rolls and thick buzzing bass to create a glitched out, uninviting beast of what is usually considered a "hip-hop" beat. It's like taking a J Dilla beat, over a Otomo Yoshihide piece, over an Aphex Twin track. It's mystifying.

bandcamp (includes a free download)