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Wednesday, August 11, 2010 By Joshua Medas
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In his latest album, Cut Chemist experiments with African beats, incorporating them into his usual hip hop music to produce a surprisingly interesting combination.
Lucas “Cut Chemist” MacFadden is a Los Angeles DJ, recognized for his distorted music that brings together various elements from different genres and time periods. His brilliant work comes from listening to old records he collected. He takes old beats that people forgot and revolutionizes them in to his own swag.
Working with turntablist DJ Shadow, Cut creates a series of ingenious songs on his latest album, “Sound of the Police.”
All the songs on his new album are used a single turntable, a mixer, a Boss RC-50 loop pedal, and a particular interest in Ethiopian and Afro-Brazilian tunes. In the first half of the album, he produces a unique texture of slow Ethio-jazz, and Sudanese music. In the first song “Jungle Beat,” Cut gives a smooth beat of drums, while at the same time he splashes in the tunes of legendary Ethiopian musician Mulatu Astatk.
Cut makes the mix more dense and complicated as he goes deeper into the album. By placing slugs on the turntable to repeat different beats, he speeds up the tempo transcending the beat into another time period about 20 minutes in to the album. He plays Sudanese music and then goes straight into hip hop or an instrument that flows with the beat he's playing.
Mixing the African music with hip hop is something Cut has never done before, but the mixture is successful and the beats flow together.
The final song, “Adidas to Addis” highlights the blend of hip hop with African culture. The song is a mixture of Ethiopian jazz and electro programming. Cut bangs the hip pop in with long lasting scratches on the mixer to let the singer’s voice ring out at the end of the song.
This level of combination is what Cut has been looking for and he expressed to his audience that he has achieved that.
Deeper in to the album, listeners may feel as if they are traveling through the regents of these countries. For now, "Sound of the Police" is showing that the DJ industry is stepping forward from their limitation of modern music to crafting a unique art of themselves.
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