Two Fingers drops seven shades of gangsta

Hip hop experimentalist Two Fingers has "dropped" a "phat" one.

As I explained in this post in January, Two Fingers is blunted beat bossman Amon Tobin and fellow Brazilian beat-botherer Doubleclick. Their debut album, also called Two Fingers, hit the "streets" in April.

And it's a right cracking listen. Er... I mean... it's a "sick" record.

The presence of MC Sway (pictured above with Doubleclick and Tobin) and grimesters like Durrty Goodz leads you to think this could be a two dimensional hip hop offering. In the hands of the Tobin, however, that was never going to happen.

Instead, among the lightning rhymes, the Two Fingers album is a glistening techno monster that tunnels to the scuzzy depths of synth buggery (on Keman Rhythm and Bad Girl, for example) and claws its way to the hilly heights of progressive big beat (on That Girl) and ketamine-drenched Timbalandia* (on Not Perfect).

It feels like we've got back the Amon Tobin of old, apart from two inescapable factoids.

Factoid A: Amon never went away. Factoid B: it's not old Tobin at all. Thanks to Doubleclick, this album is truly modern, gloriously harsh and beautifully experimental. Or, in the dialect of the "hood", it's somewhat "brap", seven shades of "gangsta" and it most certainly has got "da goods".

Innit.

* noun. In the style of producer Timbaland.

Fingers, fists and big squelchy buttons: new singles from Amon Tobin, Syntheme and HudMo

If I stuck two fingers in your face, you'd quite rightly twaz me round the chops with your broomstick.

But if I stuck Two Fingers in your face-- note the capitalization-- you'd quite rightly hold me and squeeze me and call me George.*

That's because Two Fingers is a collaborimification between smoke-hazed Ninja Tune sample king Amon Tobin (pictured) and electronic artist Doubleclick.

The first digital single of that partnership hit like a freight train this week.  What You Know has been hailed as Blade Runner played out in Tottenham.  If the streets of London are strewn with paper unicorns after this post publishes, you know why.  The single fuses hip hop and drum 'n' bass, as a twitchy nod to the early DJ Food era of Ninja Tune Records.  Mercury nominee MC Sway grimes things up good and proper with an angry rant on racial stereotypes, and it's entertaining to see Tobin make room for the vocals by stepping back from the wall-of-sound big fistedness he's known for.

The Two Fingers chaps will drop an album, which I believe will be titled eponymously, closer to Easter. 

Also out this week is Syntheme's daringly titled 12" Syntheme Vol 2.  The key word here is "squelch".  She gets a Roland TB-303 Bass Line synthesiser and pummels it until it's squelchy.  She recreates a banging acid rave in a basement by pressing a big red button labelled 'squelch'.  She squelches like no other: a fine 12" from Planet Mu Recordings.

Hudson Mohawke's new EP Polyfolk Dance is out today(ish).  He's been banging out tracks for ten years, and since he's only 22, that makes me sick.  In fact, I'm already fed up with him, so I'm not going to tell you about him justifying all the hype, about how your ears will find him outrageously addictive, and about how he's working on The Best Album Of 2009 Maybe (which will be fawned over extensively on this site - stay tuned).

*one of my favourite Looney Tunes quotes, from 1961's Abominable Snow Rabbit.