Tracklis: 01. Kiara Prelude 02. Kiara 03. Kong 04. Eyesdown feat. Andreya Triana 05. El Toro 06. We Could Forever 07. The Keeper feat. Andreya Triana 08. All In Forms 09. Wonder When feat. Andreya Triana 10. Animals 11. Black Sands
Nosaj Thing is Jason Chung, a 24-year-old producer from California with loose ties to Flying Lotus and the L.A. glitch-hop scene. His gorgeously haunted debut Drift makes it clear that while he shares a lot with Flying Lotus— a base of operations, like-minded compatriots, a deep love of hip-hop and a thousand strains of electronic music— they’re prettyfar apart in terms of approach. Spatially speaking, Flying Lotus’ music is like a cluttered studio apartment overflowing with interesting bric-a-brac— hip-hop records, comics, pieces of modern art. Chung’s music, meanwhile, is spacious and reverberant, every element echoing into the emptiness surrounding it. Drift came out on Alpha Pup, the label run by underground hip-hop producer Daddy Kev, and Nosaj Thing produced tracks on Busdriver’s latest record, but Drift has little of anything that might be recognized as “hip-hop” on it, none of Flying Lotus’ breakbeats or his analog-tape warmth. From a mood point of view, its gloomy beatscapes have a lot more in common with the bass-heavy London dubstep scene than anything his fellow L.A. laptop nerds are doing.