There is a show tonight that you must check out. It’s at the Spider House cafe, it’s only $5 and it features one of the coolest DJs in town.
I should preface this by saying that I am not a connoisseur on DJing. I loved the movie Scratch, and I’ve spent afternoons listening to Endtroducing… on repeat, but it doesn’t go much further than that. I try to check out things here and there, so I’m familiar with RJD2, 2 Many DJ’s, J Dilla and DJ Rashad; oh, and I wrote my undergraduate thesis on Girl Talk. So those are my bonafides.
But I imagine many of you are in the same boat. The vast majority of what we cover on this site is rock-based music (with an allowance for the dance-oriented rock that’s been prominent recently), with sort of similar amounts of country, bluegrass, folk and hip-hop thrown in there. So if our site intrigues you, you’re probably not a DJ connoisseur either.
And that’s why I’m fairly confident that BoomBaptist is for you. While he is versed in the hip-hop-based sounds in which so many of todays American DJs are entrenched, a lot of what I was drawn to on his most recent release (according to his Bandcamp page) was his samples of classic rock and funk.
The Lost Files Vol. 4 is a series of recordings from 2007 to 2009, so I’m not sure how well it reflects Boom’s current musical directions. But it was also released in December 2012, and thanks to a dearth of material in 2013, it’s the most recent release that we have. The way it hip-hopifies vaguely funky samples is fairly reminiscent of RJD2’s style, and if you like him, this stuff will be right up your alley. The songs that stuck out to me the most, though, were the ones that relied on source material with which I was intimately familiar.
This is a truism for much sample-based music. If the audience knows the song you’re sampling, they’ll be that much more engaged with the product. So when “Fly Like an Eagle (BoomBaptist Wigflip)” came on just shy of halfway through this mix, I was immediately engaged. Here was a classic rock staple of my youth that was bent and shaped into something familiar, yet knew. It was way more exciting than just throwing on another spin of that same old Steve Miller Band song. The journey continued on the very next track with “Swingtips” and its immediately recognizable “Dream On,” and reached a peak with the Talking Heads sample of “Drugs” on “B4 Numark Bought Akai & Everything Went to Shit.” Hearing such a deep cut as the foundation for a slick groove in the middle of this record was thrilling.
But that reaction is going to differ for everyone, depending on which samples you already know. BoomBaptist seems to be able to use familiar samples just as well as his more unknown tracks, and isn’t afraid to build a good beat and let it ride. That mix of skills should prove useful in the live setting, where he will follow Secret Levels and The Lower Class tonight. I’m excited to hear how far BoomBaptist has come since these early tapes, and I hope to see you there.
– Carter Delloro