Try and pay attention to what you do semi-consciously when listening to music. It could be that you tap your fingers or your feet in time to rhythm, grandly air-guitar/drum along to Led Zeppelin, or nod your head with tacit approval to some beats. I am currently engaged in the latter while listening to Free the Beats #6, the latest in a quarterly series of curated releases of the best of Sydney’s underground beats scene. The importance of this shouldn’t be understated – we all of course know that the sage head-nod is, for beat-heads a universal sign of approval.
Of course it is here we mention that Free the Beats is a distinctly atypical beat release – and for that, it should be applauded. The compilations emphasise diversity in style, a DIY attitude and a shared love of synthetic sounds – dubstep, glitch, hip-hop and ambient – in order to ‘turn this fragmented scene into a community’. It should be added that music of ‘the community’ is in this case not defined sonically, but rather by the shared spirit in which it is produced and distributed. Though there’s not an acoustic guitar, nasal whine or political cause in sight, one could mount an argument that this is genuine ‘folk music’. Free the Beats is a stridently independent operation; burning all 100 CD-Rs, distributing this edition inside a denim rear pocket and generally doing it all on a shoestring with no recognised label in sight.
So I’ve taken this time to explain the good karma of the FtB project. But this would ultimately feel a little hollow – both from me as a reviewer and the curators and producers involved – if the beats weren’t top-notch. Which they absolutely, truthfully are. It fills me with happiness to be able to say so without any hint of compromise; Free The Beats Vol. 6 has been on rotation on my music player and my mind for the fortnight since it arrived in the post. It opens superbly – excuse my lack of familiarity with the producers here; I’d only ever heard of Elliot before – with the Monkfly cut, ‘Cosmic’ – a spacey future jam that shimmers and drops hard. From there it goes from strength to strength, the low-down hip-hop of ‘Ego Grinding’ fading into the short, experimental Elliot workout ‘Turntable Exercise’. As an opening salvo, it is mighty impressive and stands up well to any Australian beats release of 2011, let alone 2012. Though it’s difficult to maintain the quality and diversity of the opening three tracks, Free The Beats Vol. 6 does its best, with further standouts including the Flight Recorder effort, ‘Phase’ (from the superb recent EP of the same name), Admin Beats’ ‘Dangerous’ and the maddening (only because I can’t quite pick the sample, which is dancing just out of my reach) ‘Struttin’ by Rotes.
Let’s recap. Free the Beats is a brave and big idea. But no one has to patronise it by merely talking about how it augments and unites a fragmented, young, urban Sydney beats scene. We can talk about it – and hopefully people will talk about it – because it’s damn good; and given the porous state of Australian hip-hop at present, deserves to be heard.
Mateo Szlapek-Sewillo
