Black Milk - Demo Beats 2012

Nothing could please us more than word today that our man Curtis Cross- the impossible Black Milk- was pouring over a folder of some 400 (!!!) demo beats he'd been working on over the course of the year.  Late in the day he dropped a file to his soundcloud account called Demo Beats 2012 that is certain to create a quiet storm in the Hip Hop community.

In a year that's been dominated by micro cycles of hype and canonization in 'independent' Hip Hop (see Kendrick Lamar) it was reasonable to question what place was there at the table for the last great hope Black Milk the protege and heir apparent to the neo-soul throne of his mentor J Dilla.

Cross has left no place for doubt.  This 6:57 is more future forward than one might expect from the garrulous  producer.  With his most recent production efforts (after his 2010 signal Album Of The Year) he's produced a variety of projects revered by his acolytes all of which however failed to launch anywhere near commercially or critically.  His highly anticipated collaboration with Danny Brown the Black and Brown EP admittedly didn't amount to more than the sum of its parts (and was fairly thoroughly drubbed critically).  Similarly Random Axe the Hip Hop supergroup composed of Guilty Simpson, Sean Price and Black Milk yielded varied results.  Two recent collaborations with Jack White (Brain and Royal Mega) were promising in principal as was a live set at White's Third Man Records.  His much vaunted collaboration Searching For Sanity with vocalist Melanie Rutherford has yet to appear.

Demo Beats 2012 drops like something of a clarion call from a man who may feel like he has something to prove.  The futuristic style of the transmission harkens back to his own 2008 release Tronic which largely put him on the map particularly with collaborations like The Matrix (featuring Pharoahe Monche and Sean Price).  His first releases 2005's Sound Of The City (as well as 11 untitled tracks from August 2005), 2006's Broken Wax EP and the landmark Popular Demand (2008) established Black Milk as a strong advocate of the neo-soul tradition highly adept with the MPC 2000.  The Music Production Center 2000 has signal processing qualities that are highly pleasing to the human ear as most sample based music we're familiar with has been produced with this device.  Some producers would say that it is the loss of signal, a pleasing 'woody' quality to the sample, as much as the transmission that satisfies the listener aurally.

Milk, a drummer and percussionist, who appears on the cover of Popular Demand with an MPC tucked under his arm plays the 'instrument' live and in the studio better than most any human being.  Which is what makes this teaser of his current output so fascinating.  This material veers out into some new bracing territory (sounding at times unabashedly similar to even Dilla's Donuts with it's style of constant revolutions of sound) that suggests a much broader sonic palette and production environment.  Where Album Of The Year was definitive for how he captured the live sounds of instrumentalists Daru Jones (drums), AB (keys) and bassist Tim Shellabarger (not as much for his personal lyrics of the crushing year he had marked by loss) here we see a man tossing off, literally, a tossed off beat (one of 400 he'd rather hold onto for now) that echoes at points his deep crates neo-soul lineage while pointing clearly to a whole new bag.