Much of what I love about beat music, admittedly, I do not fully understand. For one, the lure of the technological sublime, apparent in other computer-based music, isn’t an aspiration for most beatmakers. Dancing, another cornerstone, doesn’t apply, either: total concentration, almost to the point of deep meditation, is needed or is at least implied when listening. Nearly everything — from fashion to distribution to aesthetics — about other electronic music genres contrasts beat music, and that’s why I like it. It’s being really real, without a care for historical progression. It’s also being mysterious, sculpting a space for the listener so that they may interpret, converse, and ask questions. It’s also largely geographically centered, in Los Angeles. It’s open, compelling, and non-didactic.
yuk, one of the many producers from L.A., crafts lo-fi, 404-SX-heavy beats more about dirt, magnetic tape, vinyl dust, and cultural detritus than about shiny synths, expensive studios, and club fame. The music on his new release for LEAVING fits the mood of the city: discombobulated but alluring, with a social context clinging to the edges. His beats duck underneath the melody — sometimes but not always sidechained — like little, in-rhythm earthquakes. The haze is thick and rubbery like a car tire, the melodies wet and warm, buzzing with non-lexical activity. It’s like a refreshing glass of water &mdsah; something perhaps prized right now in L.A. — as sustainable environmentalists scramble to find a solution for Southern California’s current drought.
What can you do in the world, as one person, and what can you say to another person that could change their environmental footprint or have them think about objects bigger than themselves, like the ecosystem they live in, which, for so much of L.A.’s history, was hidden away from its residents, foggy and concealed, not worried about, simply behind a mask of political strangleholds, of subsidies and crunching, abstract language, leading to nothing but conspiracies? You can make beats: a world scribbled in a sketchbook of sound. They are there to excavate things, to flesh something out, and have it fade away quickly, almost without asking. Though simple, they state their politics in groups. They are there as archipelagos. They are leaves blowing between this imaginary, digital world and the sky, which is sometimes a terrible, smog-filled color.
yuk’s beats are a tender blur. They echo and sometimes blaze, like a sunset, or roast, like a chicken. They are reminders, post-it notes, exercises, and cut-off fragments. They’re temporal, but they seem almost excused from time. They say one thing, softly. Their thereness never exhausts the reality of L.A. They capture the in-between moments of life: like the walk to your apartment from your car, the sip of a cup of tea, a gaze into the sun-drenched trees, or the sound of an empty library. They want you to be in the moment. Because of that, they have a Buddhist inflection.
When meditating, your breathing is beating, and your beating is being. Being, in beat music, becomes a product of matter and energy. Nature and music are outside of each other, melding into one, in us. Geography and mind-phenomena meet on this album. It’s not an exact, constrained science — in fact, it’s sloppy and emotional. Whether I’m on a side street in L.A., on the beach, inside a bar, or in a small bedroom, I can’t see the whole landscape, but I can hear it. a n a k is that music. And I think that’s enough.