What is a band without their DJ? Think of Run DMC's Jam Master Jay, Public Enemy's Terminator X and Linkin Park's Mr. Hahn; sometimes behind the scenes but their presence resides in the beats. So on to my favorite group, the Beastie Boys, and their newest [but not all that new] member Mix Master Mike.
Ok skip the boring bio of where he was born what his real name is and his D.O.B., you can google that stuff yourself.... so onwards to his DJ career and where I heard him first. SSX Tricky.
SSX Tricky was a cool and completely unrealistic, but fun snowboarding game. The soundtrack was one of the things that really caught my ear. The main song was a slight remix of Run DMC's Tricky but I was able to look pass that to appreciate the rest of the soundtrack. The soundtrack consisted primarily of heavy bass, almost urban type beats, which grabbed me immediately, the song that stuck out the most however was Board Burner by Mix Master Mike. Of course I became even more interested once I found out he was a playable character. Interest faded a bit when newer and slightly more interesting games came forward.
Moving on to 2004, MTV was having an all day Beastie Boys marathon to celebrate the release of their latest album, To The 5 Boroughs; this marathon introduced me to the Beastie Boys as a whole group, but it was hard to ignore Mix Master Mike's role especially in the song 3 MC's and 1 DJ. That song blew me away as to what the turntable was capable of, I mean, consistently scratching to produce a beat is just cool. The marathon continued and so did my interest when they started showing some vids from some of their live concerts, now I can't find the exact vids that were shown on MTV but this song pretty much sum up the awesomeness that is MMM's super clean transitions. Skills To Pay The Bills and Intergalactic.
So after seeing so much of this awesome scratching mixed with heavy bass and sounds from space, I decided to look for independent work done by Mix Master Mike. This brought me towards the Invisibl Skratch Piklz, the DJ group to top all DJ groups, and his friendly rivalry with DJ Qbert. [Their DJ battle in the 1995 DMC DJ World Championships can be seen here.] But it was not until this year when I finally got a full whiff of a full album from him. After following him on Twitter for a while, he announced the release of his [completely free] new mixtape called Napalm Rockets [which can be downloaded here] The bass is just amazing, the transitions are clean and the selection of songs are epic [from select songs from the Beastie Boys, to an entire remix of Santigold's Creator all the way up to a feature of Ini Kamoke's World-A-Music]. I also found more albums on his site such as Live Beatdown vol 1 and the completely ill Memoirs of a Serial Wax Killer.
I don't know about you but I find his intense use of bass appealing, there are tracks on his albums that just force you to pause and sit back in awe. Some of the songs featured in his albums exposed to other genre's that I've fell in love with [particularly dubstep and grime]. You can probably tell I'm bad at describing music, and to admit it is really hard. So my suggestion is to just download one [or all 3] of his albums available on the site.
Moar LINKS!!
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