Black Milk - Demo Beats 2012

Black Milk, a producer/rapper as well as drummer/percussionist, who appears on the cover of his landmark album Popular Demand with an MPC tucked under his arm, plays the 'instrument' live and in the studio better than most any human being (Pete Rock's up there too).  Which is part of what makes Demo Beats 2012- a recently dropped teaser of his current output so fascinating.  This future-forward material veers out into some new bracing territory (sounding at times unabashedly similar to even Dilla's Donuts with it's style of constant revolutions of sound) that suggests a much broader sonic palette and production environment.  Where his last full length release Album Of The Year was definitive for how he captured the live sounds of instrumentalists Daru Jones (drums), AB (keys) and bassist Tim Shellabarger (not as much for his personal lyrics of the crushing year he had marked by loss) here we see a man tossing off, literally, a series of tossed off beats (one of 400 produced in the last year he'd rather hold onto for now) that echoes at points his deep crates neo-soul lineage while pointing to something else entirely.

Black Milk, Album Of The Year preview

Although an old clip this is the most in depth preview of Black Milk in the studio, first talking about the forthcoming Random Axe collaboration (Black Milk, Guilty Simpson, Sean Price), then an album he's doing with  vocalist Melanie Rutherford called Searching for Sanity then his own highly anticipated Album Of The Year.  Simply seeing the young Curtis Cross move nimbly in his own studio is electrifying, some of the best footage comes at the end though when his live drummer Daru comes into the studio and they work out a dizzying live beat.