♫♪  Alphabets - THRU THA RIP

Alphabets is fucking L A R G E and contains multitudes and you are ready for them. By presenting you now with the husk of my brain, left battered and euphoric by alien-bass Bandcamp masterworks like 400YEN or On Champagne and Greyhounds, I can empirically prove that every beat the Denver-based producer has ever tracked has blown at least one mind. I mean my mind. The mind is mine. I’ve hacked my way beneath the surface of what Alphabets (born Colin Ward) has uploaded online, and physically released on labels like Digitalis and Deathbomb Arc, but this next phase of the Alphabets catalog Step(s) It Up: a) 2 Fast; b) 2 Furious; c) 2 The Streets.

THRU THA RIP, Ward’s most recent 70-min breakbeat behemoth, showcases a more frenetic and densely layered production style than I’ve ever heard from his project. Tracks like highlight “Raptor Jazz” construct rotating auditory mandalas from chopped vocal samples, hypnotizing tom grids, and cyborg synths, speeding through intricate percussion patterns just long enough for your mind to enter the zone before cycling into new territories. Alphabets slaps acid house, hip-hop, and West African polyrhythms together like hunks of different colored Play-Doh, rolls them together into a gruesome rainbow snake, and leaves it to fuse with your living room carpet. Alphabets lifts your eyelids open while you’re sleeping and plays Aaliyah samples into your brain cavity at a volume just low enough not to wake you. Alphabets turns up the tempo on his Roland JX-305 Groovesynth and leaves your legs and hips too mystified to continue moving, but too overstimulated to stop. Quoth the maestro: “blood, sex, booze, glitter and alien dogs / cats / lizards and birds.”

Stream THRU THA RIP now on Bandcamp. Name your own price to download the album. Let one sincere “Thank you” escape your lips and flit through the ether to Rhinoceropolis.

• Alphabets: http://alphabets.bandcamp.com

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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