Release Date: Aug 5, 2016
Genre(s): Electronic, House, Techno, Left-Field House, Left-Field Hip-Hop
Record label: L.A. Club Resource
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It's not easy to be a Delroy Edwards fan. In 2012, the imposing Angeleno emerged on L.I.E.S. with 4 Club Use Only, a banging 12-inch with the tossed-off amateurism of ghetto house. He remained in the dance zone for a while, touring Europe, playing Paul Johnson records on Boiler Room and launching his own label, L.A.
Delroy Edwards has a knack for turning the past into the future. Through his label L.A. Club Resource and online store Gene’s Liquor, he unearths old underground rap and techno tapes that sound remarkably fresh, and his own music, be it his pumping house jams on L.I.E.S. or the cassette-sourced mixes he calls Slowed Down Funk, is drenched in a similar kind of creative nostalgia.
Delroy Edwards released his first few 12"s on former co-worker Ron Morelli's trendsetting L.I.E.S. (Long Island Electrical Systems) label, so it's almost inevitable that he's been tagged as "outsider house" ever since. Most of his subsequent releases, which he's often issued via his own L.A. Club Resource, have maintained the hissy, lo-fi quality of his dance 12"s, but have little if anything to do with house or techno.
After turning heads with his EPs for Ron Morelli's L.I.E.S., Delroy Edwards now issues his debut full-length, Hangin' At The Beach, on his own L.A. Club Resource label.Edwards' ultra lo-fi production remains intact here, for better or worse, lending the album his usual recorded-on-a-bedroom-boombox aesthetic. Perhaps not so usually, it spans 30 tracks, most of which are under two minutes, and as a result, ideas are rarely developed very far.
The beach isn't the first image that springs to mind when listening to Los Angeles producer Delroy Edwards's debut album. As with the string of 12-inches and mixtapes he's released on his own imprint, L.A. Club Resource, and for others, most notably respected techno label L.I.E.S., its 30 tracks are full of hard and raw drum patterns muffled by tape hiss and distortion that make his recordings sound as if they were unearthed after decades in a storage locker.
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