One Word Extinguisher

Warp really likes one man bands, like really—Aphex Twin, Bibio, NOW, Squarepusher, Flying Lotus, and Scott Herren, known as Prefuse 73. There is a constellation (a big one) of producers who learned sampling the way DJ Premier taught it, as a way of assembling delicious rhythm pixels into something disorienting and fun. Plenty of people, like DJ Shadow, made something kind of like hip-hop with that idea, and others, like Herren and Evelyn of NOW, went further out along the orbit path. One Word Extinguisher is a glittering quilt stitched from little swatches of raw material, which occasionally bunches up and gets a rapper stretched across it, for a moment of actual rap. Not often, though— this is a mostly instrumental ribbon that winds around itself and plumes upwards. The closest analogue is maybe Four Tet’s Beautiful Rewind, though this album hits fairly hard and has some real stake in being a head-nodding affair. All done with an MPC, this can sound entirely like live music, or lost movie music, or small soul operas.