Various Artists
Eccentric Breaks & Beats
Well if you can’t beat ‘em, take back what’s yours, sort of. For several years now, the Chi-town based Numero Group has amassed a catalogue of obscure soul, funk, folk and rock while at the same time working tirelessly clearing song licenses and paying royalties to musicians. What their hustle means to all the crate-diggers is that their collection is like a BP oil, it’s like that liquid black gold that sprung a massive leak — that leak being that they made it that much easier for DJs to sample without all the beat mining. Numerous times the Numero Group has seen their multi-volume Eccentric Soul series, which featured ultra-rare grooves, get hoodwinked into other of the like compilations. And of course in this case, the story does get that much better.
A production team under the guise of Shoes, had pressed up an unauthorized 40-minute mega-mix comprised from about as many as 70 Eccentric Soul releases, which was making the rounds and landed into the hands of certain “taste-makers” within the DJ community. “We’ve been bootlegged before, certainly,” the label posted on its blog. “… But this really takes the cake.” Instead of putting on the legal pouty face the label was “hooked on the flawlessly arranged pastiche.” Rather than dropping the legal hammer they flipped the script and decided to ingeniously (as the press release says) “bootleg the bootleg.”
On the musical side, Eccentric Breaks & Beats, the beats prove to be just about as interesting as its story. The source material in rearranged in such a way that the songs are nearly unidentifiable from it’s original song, which can be it’s double edged sword. The looped instrumentals weaved in with the percussion samples makes for a surely smooth listening, but it’s done so intricately, perhaps a little too smooth that it loses it’s identity — sometimes you just want to hear the original song, or at least enough to identify what exactly was sampled. Though on it’s own merits, this collection breaks and beats from the elusive team Shoes is enough to put on the rotation alongside other classics from Madlib, RJD2 and DJ Shadow.
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