Dday One: Loop Extensions
Needlework

Crate-diggin' with the best'of'em, Dday One stirs a tasty cocktail of woodsy acoustic bass lines and boom-bap throughout Loop Extensions ten sample-heavy cuts. The LA-based producer's debut album anchors a left-field cornucopia of eclectic sounds—folk instruments, entranced vocal musings, furious scratching, interview snippets—with the snap, crackle, and pop of driving breaks. Though the disc's largely instrumental, check out the MC quartet (Existereo, Subtitle, Awol One, Metfly) that appears over slamming tic-toc beats in “Unstable Material 2” as well as the ridiculously intricate verbal collage in “MCs on Strike” (Dday wrote the lyrics first and then tracked down vocal samples to match); listen also for the serpentine saxophone that coils over grinding snare splatter in “Seeds of Revolution” (and might that be Wayne Shorter spreading his sublime bleat all over “Nigerian Soil”?). Apparently the self-styled double major in hip-hop (turntablism and sampling) had 500 vinyl copies pressed upon the album's completion to help spread the word and almost immediately had luminaries like Cut Chemist and LA DJ Mike Nardone requesting copies. No surprise here: while admittedly not revolutionary, Dday's instrumental hip-hop holds up strongly enough.

March 2006