Beat Detectives

Beat Detectives

Climate Change

Not Not Fun

Climate Change marks Minneapolis/Brooklyn block party brain-scrambler trio Beat Detectives’ debut on the vinyl format after a splatterpaint trail of tapes for the 1080p, 100% Silk, Where To Now, Moon Glyph, and Night People labels. Their time is now. The album’s 14 cuts coast and crunk within a Quaalude Quadrangle of blasted dub (“Roaring Lion”), cro-magnon acid (“Reward Card,” “Three Pointer”), hijacked funk (“Dead Girl At A Party,” “Sands Of Slime”), and smeared low rider bass grease (“Magic Island Ripper,” “When You Wake Up”), spliced with speaker-blown samples and singer Oakley Tapola’s dazed, glazed vocals. Rhythm constructionists Aaron Anderson and Chris Hontos channel a fried, psychedelic Friday vibe, in service to a higher cause: “Push it towards something else.” Something temporary, something ripping, something more than the sum of its parts – Climate Change congeals Beat Detectives’ mixtape-you’d-find-in-the-trunk mission statement into a positive journey of swap meet magic and melted body music. Change or be changed. Black vinyl LPs in whacked fontmanship jackets designed by Anderson; mastered by Collin Gorman Weiland.

Beat Detectives

Music 2

100% Silk

Anarchic trash-techno trios from Minneapolis aren't necessarily a plentiful commodity in our experience, especially ones as freewheeling and funked up as Beat Detectives. Comprised of visual artist Aaron Anderson, Chris Hontos (also of Food Pyramid and Dreamweapon), and the multi-talented Oakley Tapola, the group got their start playing a heavily smeared form of rudimentary dance music at "dirt raves in punker basements" around the Twin Cities before Anderson relocated to NYC. Music 2 is the perfect sophomore stepping stone slab, following their Casual Encounters Of The Third Kind debut collection on Moon Glyph earlier this year. Woozy house mutations and pitch-shifted party-acid experiments congeal and dissolve around Tapola's delirious, deadpan vocals (she manages to make lyrics like "American flag / with weed leaves / replacing the stars" sound strange and deranged instead of silly), interspersed with dizzy dub grooves and displaced electro-jack. Reminiscent in places of those weird deep cuts on certain late 80's Warrior Records acid comps, before the style got codified and normalized. Regenerative club mutagen for a world with a stick up its ass. Recorded in Minneapolis and Brooklyn, 2012-2013, and mastered by Cole Weiland.