♫♪  Lockbox - boi

Lockbox is Denver-based beat wunderkind Jesse Briata. Since 2011, Briata has birthed three gleaming cassette tapes into the world — Archangel Heat, Passion Beam, and Hypersecret — along with a number of CD-R and digital-only releases. This is the part of my post where I say “Not Bad For A Kid Who’s Only 18 Years Old” and then we try to move on — but yeah, wait, whoa: Lockbox has yet to enter his third decade of life. I don’t feel bad kinda harping on this, because Briata broadcasts his age above all other information online. If I produced such idiosyncratic, vibrant music when I was 18, I’d do the same thing. You’re only a teen once. Or, you know, for 10 years. But whatever. Even if Jesse Briata was a 48-year-old bald actuary uploading his beats to SoundCloud from a mud hut in Yukon, I’d gobble ‘em up with the same delight.

Briata dropped an album called boi last month. Stream it down below to hear his scattershot breaks and dizzying electronic swirls sequenced together in Renoise collide with carnival-core synth lines and the thump of a Roland 404 — not unlike, say, Aphex Twin circa the RDJ Album trapped in the proverbial trap, tripping balls face down in the grime, wallowing real deep in the imaginary ball pit of an imaginary McD’s PlayPlace. boi has many highlights: the bonkers sing-song monotone of “PRIDENJOY,” the Dan Deacon boss battle max-out of “Ego Death” (complete with barking dog abuse), the Aaliyah sample that threads its way through “Yung Lil” aaaall daaaay looong. Ms. Haughton told us Age Ain’t Nothing But A Number when she was 15; Lockbox’s beats confirm her teen credo today. I’m gonna keep both my ears on him and see what comes next. The way he tells it, it might be something resembling a “rap album.” I’m on board.

• Lockbox: https://soundcloud.com/monstre

Chocolate Grinder

CHOCOLATE GRINDER is our audio/visual section, with an emphasis on the lesser heard and lesser known. We aim to dig deep, but we’ll post any song or video we find interesting, big or small.

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