Badawi - Bedouin Sound Clash

Sound alchemist from NYC.

"Raz Mesinai -- aka Badawi -- was born in Jerusalem in 1973, and was raised in New York City. At age 11, Mesinai went into a record store looking for instrumental rap and came out with dub, hooking the lad to a life of delay and tape echo. A decade later, he was being hailed as one of the most important DJs in NYC. Meanwhile, Mesinai began studying rhythms of Persian, Indian, Yemenite, Moroccan, and Afro-Cuban styles at an early age. After making a number of basement recordings, Mesinai hooked up with friend John Ward to form the influential dub duo Sub Dub, which saw the friends draw on their love of hip hop, house, Middle Eastern, Irish, and dub.

As Badawi, Mesinai samples his own live playing, then digitally treats it through smearing, stretching, and looping. Badawi's ROIR recordings are filled with angular and hypnotic rhythms, subtle electronic processing, dubbed out fuzz bass, and creative compositions. Mesinai's music channels the spirit of dub masters Lee "Scratch" Perry, King Tubby, and Augustus Pablo, easing your body as it frees your mind."- Mat Mahoney

Fruit Flies

Nettle - Build A Fort, Set That On Fire

Nettle are (or were) DJ/Rupture, DD, Jenny Jones, and Abdel Hak.

"As the opportunities for collage recordings become more and more detailed and intricate, artists like DD and DJ Rupture, who make up Nettle, are in a prime position to create collaged beatscapes the likes of which just weren't possible ten years ago. Digesting a wide range of music between them, Nettle bares the marks of two love affairs with sound. Each of the group's members bring with them a large record collection, which has been sampled and laid out into free flowing cut-ups. There's eastern and "world" influences, gabba kick drums, dancehall grooves, one off hip-hop vocal lines, processed drum n bass grooves and seemingly countless other reference points that map out this duo's artistic background. The end result of this collision of sound objects is hard to summarise. Like the artwork on this disc lifted from Goin's "Nuclear Landscapes", this record is the aftermath of a musical explosion. It;s the remnant soundscapes that exist post a studio fallout. They're alien and sometimes eerily unfamiliar, but there's a character to them that's truly unique and fascinating." - Lawrence English

Minesweeper Dub