Beulah Land

altered beats- assassin knowledge of the remanipulated

this is one of the great albums put out in the 90s by the now- comatose Axiom label, this one focusing on hip-hop and the use of sampling & turntables. some cool tracks from Bill Laswell and company, the highlights are the Invisibl Skratch Picklz (the greatest DJ crew in the world: Qbert, Mixmaster Mike, Shortkut, Apollo & Yoga Frog) dropping some wax knowledge and Prince Paul & Bootsy Collins' incredibly drugged-out cover of "if 6 was 9". also features dj rob swift, dj krush, jah wobble, DXT and others. i will post the Axiom Dub album soon. the liner notes alone are worth tracking down this out of print CD (an excerpt below):

Some of the seemingly more erudite and forward-thinking musicologists and critics who fancy themselves as outside "experts" on hip-hop have identified the turntable in the hands of the DJ as an instrument, with the singular scratching and backspinning techniques akin to soloing on a saxophone in the jazz idiom. An informative analog, to be sure, but in essence it falls short of the quantum conceptual leap that urban brujos like Grandmaster Flash, Grandmixer D.ST (known today as DXT to protect the innocent) and other illuminati made long ago: the turntable is more like a drum than anything else. Aside from the obvious phsical resemblance of the circular platter to the typical drum head, the turntable/mixer system is in effect "played" with the hands , the black wax rhythmically manipulated by the fingers, just as the tightly wound skin of a conga or West African tribal drum is coaxed into sonic nuances with open-handed slaps, cupped mutes, and pitch-bends (such as those created by sliding the fingertip from the outer edge of a vibrating skin toward its center -- a motion that is particularly striking in its absorption into DJ legerdemain.) Turntables were first used in DJ fashion to isolate "break beats" -- the crucial beatwise hook buried in a rare groove that, to quote Rakim, "moves the crowd," heightening the urgency of the music and inspiring dancers to their most individualized and innovative steps. In the same way, the Ghanian master drummer uses specific rhythms or "calls" to elicit a response from the drummers and dancers, completely changing the mood of a particular song and often elevating the tempo to feverishly hypnotic peaks. Finally DJs and drummers alike undergo a very real physical transformation -- a DNA flux -- owing to the practice of their art, with the hands and fingers of the DJ often morphing into gracefully thin, wiry, almost elastic appendages, and the palms and metacarpals of the drummer rendered thick and soft with constant playing.
Just as the turntable hearkens back to the original pulic telephone, with the advent of the next millenium it also encapsulates and foreshadows new explorations in necessarily clandestine modes of communication and information dispersal. The reasons for secrecy are simple...even now the effects of media control and censorship of, for example, the so-called information superhighway are being felt: ideas not in keeping with the (fully imaginary and uptopian) American mainstream are rejected or openly persecuted by that enitity's elected custodians and their constituents; thus, access to the "highway" is often limited due to what is presented as reanimiation of Big Brother designed to monitor and homogenize that flow. Hip-hop, supported until now only by the wheels of steel and the ingenuity of its proponents, has become a forum for transmittal and discussion of such allegedly controversial topics, and with any luck the music will continue to evolve even further into an innately understood Esperanto or language, instantly download-able to our young descendants through genetic code or an apparatus such as -- dare we imagine it -- William Gibson's wet-wired implants... from the stylus directly to the brain. However the transition is realized, it will undoubtedly be revolutionary...to the tune of approximately 33 1/3 revolutions per minute.
Of course this idea of hip-hop or for that matter any African-based music -- which comprises virtually all the music identified as "American" in this part of the world -- as a valuable source of information to its initiates is not a new one. Nor is the observation that it must conceal itself in some way to thwart the destructive intentions of its enemies. Poets and authors from Paul Laurence Dunbar to Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka) have identified the need to "wear the mask," while latter-day voices like Chuck D describe hip-hop as the "Black CNN" -- an oft-cited, even nearly cliched, but still indelibly valid assessment. Still others on the fringe see hip-hop as a constantly adapting changeling, using "...'virtual absence' -- being everywhere and nowhere -- as a stepping stone, and by incorporating all the elements of a virus into its culture, [thriving] in a place where everything that had been possibly put in its way to kill it has failed..."(cf. DJ Spooky, Tha' Subliminal Kid, in his notes to Valis I: The Destruction of Syntax[Subharmonic]). Axiom's Altered Beats ascribes in theory to all these modern viewpoints, with a significant twist: not only does the mutability of hip-hop language -- whose satellite dish is the turntable -- protect the user's identity, inform his or her perspective on the world, and incite fear and misunderstanding in all detractors, but ultimately it should aspire to render possible a deeper, almost bone-chilling exploration of the real, primordial and ungettered self... and this exploration, under ideal conditions, would be aided and abetted by a free, unfettered, completely experimental and even, in the Taoist sense, nearly incomprehensible music -- thus suggesting endless interpretations, endless solutions to endless mysteries...and from many, the One would emerge. -Bill Murphy