3mitsu - cloudjoints
New year’s eve eve I’m on a ferry to Watson’s Bay about to have an overpriced but amazing piss-up with a bunch of friends. I’m peeping Sydney harbour from outside the ferry engulfed by the crystal clear oceans and smooth blue skies. I’ve got my headphones on listening to cloudjoints smiling like a kid. I first came upon this tape only a few months after its release, in the early stages of my deep dive into this branch of instrumental hiphop. Even though he’d later refine this style, there’s something so thrilling about the deeply sporadic attitude 3mitsu has on this one, throwing rapid successions of drum patterns and sample chops at the wall like dribs and drabs of paint. As soon as ‘missyougirl’ blasts through, we hear exactly where we’re headed on this journey, flipping airy synths and wanting vocals among a flurry of fried hihats and double-hit snares. I’ve said it before about mitsu, but I still find his drum programming completely unique, taking ‘Dilla Time’s concepts of tension and release and stretching the rubber band almost as far as it’ll go - punchy kicks often landing far behind the 1 and 2, and snapping snares pulled far before the 3. It’s a dizzying quality that seems pretty cocophonous upon your first couple of listens but starts tying itself together in perfect knots the more you spin. But what initially drew me into cloudjoints was the wide array of samples. Take a beat like ‘wayside’ which almost seems to fall and flail over itself in its licks of guitar and discordant leads that keeps striking through every bar, followed-up immediately with something so much more slow and steady with ‘sosweet’, with its surypy deep vocals and lagging kicks. This thing jumps from one explosive idea to the next, never waning on one for too long but always keeping itself expressive. Every time I hit play on this one I’m transported back to those beautiful conditions outside the ferry, and everything is okay.
KEY BEAT: be alright pt. 1 & 2 - never sure exactly why but these back-to-back tracks always felt so triumphant to me, smothered in offkilter hats and warm claps, asyllabic hums inviting you in by the second half.