Samiyam
Sam Baker's Album
Release Date: Jul 5, 2011
Genre(s): Pop/Rock
Record label: Brainfeeder
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Album Review: Sam Baker's Album by Samiyam
Fairly Good, Based on 4 Critics
Based on rating 6.3/10
This year, producers like Clams Casino, Araabmuzik, DJ Burn One, and Main Attraktionz' Squadda B have been turning out amorphous beats that sound just as good (and especially in Clams' case, better) without someone spitting over them. The music they're making is beguilingly strange, and although much of it carries bits and pieces of J Dilla's legacy, most sounds far removed from his dusty knock. Dilla set a precedent for the producer-as-auteur movement, but his influence is less apparent in the twisted synths and borrowed trance figures of this year's most interesting beatmakers.
Based on rating 3/5
[a]Samiyam[/a]’s debut, [b]‘Rap Beats Vol 1’[/b], was a churning compilation of instrumental hip-hop sketches that sounded like it was downloaded from a wired brain after severe Dilla burnout. Yet, like sometime collaborator [a]Flying Lotus[/a], [a]Samiyam[/a] has a knack for re-arranging a dissonant tangle of ideas into a psychedelic odyssey. Jagged, low-riding funk reminiscent of Hudson Mohawke ([b]‘Bedtime’[/b]) meets samples of cats ([b]‘Kitties’[/b]) while eight-bit flourishes trigger flushes of Hyperdub-styled weirdness throughout.
Opinion: Very Good
Out of all the abstracted takes on hip-hop to have emerged from Steve Ellison's (aka Flying Lotus) Brainfeeder label, and the Los Angeles scene that surrounds it, Sam Baker's feels most grounded in physical reality. Although it remains as in debt to Dilla's woozy, scattered-across-the-beat-grid vision of the genre, his music as Samiyam keeps its head firmly out of the fuzzy ether explored by contemporaries like Lotus and Matthewdavid. With that in mind, his signing an EP to Hyperdub in 2008 made sense.
Opinion: Very Good
A mutated take on the funkier end of electro from the FlyLo collaborator. Chris Power 2011 Samiyam, aka Sam Baker, is a name that’s become familiar over the last few years to anyone following the growth of post-Dilla hip hop and its best known proponent, Flying Lotus. The duo have recorded as FlyAmSam and a grab-bag of Samiyam beats (Rap Beats Vol.
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