Review Summary: Finding the delicacy in instrumental hip-hop
Over the past two years TMCT (aka Tomcat Beats) has been twisting the skeleton of Hip-Hop into his own spherical domain. It’s a place of craft and subtley over the often bombastic and exaggerated depths of instrumental hip-hop; hinting at greats like J Dilla and Madlib, and more recent talents like the exotica hopping Monster Rally and elegant lo-fi weaving of Ahnnu.
Snow Beach Vol. 01 is TMCT’s first official release since being picked up by Bootleg Tapes, an ambitious net label hosting a creative whirlpool of eccentric purveyors twisting and mangling samples and found sounds to outrageous caricatures of themselves. However TMCT’s conscious crate digging of delicate and soulful samples over classic boom bap beats creates a kind of inextinguishable thread between the organic sounds of live percussion and voice and atypical DJ sensibility that embraces deviations of the natural.
Snow Beach unwinds its reels at ‘SNOWBEACH’, unearthing a muted jazz guitar that gently guides a boppin’ kick beat over a looped vocal sample that nods to the street poetry of
Illmatic. Later the sound gets deeper on ‘TRUSSME’, as the entire track becomes muted and sways softly beneath a layer of tape fuzz. Throughout the tape, gorgeous and quietly floating piano samples inject TMCT’s straight forward rhythmic sense with a dreamy and whimsical perception, best heard on the stunning and unfortunately brief ‘PAPA’. This technique often creates a sound that isn’t hip-hop at all, but rather closer to the intimate, endlessly looping samples Andrew Pekler or The Caretaker, heard on tracks like the fragile jazz of ‘ALLOFYOU’, the slow-beat haunt of ‘CHERISHER’, or the lo-fi obscured vocal howls of ‘HOLDONTUWIT’.
Upon passive listens of
Snow Beach Vol. 01, it would be easy to accuse the sound of stagnation or lacking diversity, and while there is certainly a tight palette being explored here, the sound is so sophisticated and beautifully crafted that the ambiguity between tracks attempts rather to create a singular and cohesive listening experience than to explore multiple genres, styles, and moods. With this in mind,
Snow Beach exceeds the often crippling context of instrumental hip-hop, as music that is fragmented, aimless, and incomplete without an MC breathing life and purpose into its sound, because TMCT speaks volumes through his strikingly subtle, charming, atmospheric, and accessible ear for melding natural and organic resonance through his instrumentals. This is also music that exists in an age where the genre is constantly attempting to reinvent itself as hip hop continues to dominate the mainstream, most of the time haphazardly so through maximized and over-exaggerated attempts to stay cutting edge. TMCT realizes that with art it’s not always about originality or innovation, but rather standing out and prevailing within an already established and beloved context, something that’s ultimately harder to come by in a world run on constant acceleration and expectation.
