One Word Extinguisher cover

One Word Extinguisher

Released

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.

Sasha Frere-Jones

Suggestions
Amok cover

Amok

Atoms for Peace
Multila cover

Multila

Vladislav Delay
Amber cover

Amber

Autechre
Risp LP cover

Risp LP

Richard Devine
Form Grows Rampant cover

Form Grows Rampant

The Threshold HouseBoys Choir
Nek Sanalet cover

Nek Sanalet

Kit Clayton
Topdown Dialectic cover

Topdown Dialectic

Topdown Dialectic