Leading the charge to town is their most valuable playa, Beans, with his solo debut, Tomorrow Right Now. Fresh from breaking free from his East Coast crew Anti-Pop Consortium, the Mohawked MC spills his pungent flow over his own computer-programmed configurations, making many of the songs sound like angry musings from a fed-up iMac.
Beats speak louder than words at the Warp factory, which leads us into the latest release from increasingly hyped-up crate-digger Prefuse 73. With the cut-and-paste deconstructionist tone he brought to his Vocal Studies + Uprock Narratives, Prefuse has already been compared to DJ Shadow. He continues in that vein with One-Word Extinguisher, melding digitized blips with old-school breaks. Although his stuff isn't quite up there with the exemplary dark works of Shadow, Prefuse's buoyant beat-tripping is still worth a listen.
Also now on the tour are Ohio sampler Boom Bip -- whose noisy, nervy collage Seed to Sun begs comparison to DJ Spooky -- and A Grape Dope, which finds former Tortoise drummer John Herndon joining in on the aural madness. So hip-hop heads and techno geeks, unite! Sip a Red Bull or two, learn from one another's cultures and, if time permits, go halves on a baby.
