DJ Cam

Parisian hip-hop devotee Laurent Daumail is definitely one of several but growing amount of French artists updating hip-hop for the chill-out crowd, pulling about the beats’n’samples groundwork of producers such as for example Rakim, DJ Leading, and Prince Paul and combining it with wide, impressionistic strokes of dub, jazz, and soundtrack-y ambience. Like countrymen the Mighty Bop and la Funk Mob, Cam can be stylistically closest to Mo’Wax performers such as for example DJ Darkness and DJ Krush; minimalist, downbeat instrumental hip-hop constructed from obscure examples and stomp-box turntable accompaniment, bent and twisted into fresh, artfully organized compositions. His debut, 1994’s Underground Vibes, premiered on the small French label Road Jazz and was accompanied by a live documenting for the Inflammable imprint (among just a few “live” recordings inside a genre therefore reliant for the temporal concessions from the documenting studio room). Dubbed Underground Live, the record highlighted performed extrapolations of several from the monitors from his debut, and a few brand-new and improvised monitors. Now extremely difficult to discover, those initial two albums had been reissued in the us by Shadow Information, packaged jointly as the single-CD costed Mad Blunted Jazz (especially useful since obtaining both on import could work a lot more than 50 dollars!). Although Cam’s music provides found little approval in his house nation, where racial stress provides stratified the hip-hop community into rigid explanations of the actual music is normally — and who ought to be rendering it (Cam himself is normally white) — viewers in the U.K., Japan, and America possess begun picking right up on his design. In 1996 Cam was highlighted on, among numerous others, the sprawling Mo’Wax compilation Headz 2, remixed monitors for such performers as Tek 9 and la Funk Mob, & most lately collaborated on live and in-studio tasks with Snooze and DJ Krush (he co-wrote several monitors over the latter’s 1997 Mo’Wax discharge, Mi Audio). Cam released Chemicals on Inflammable in 1997. Another calendar year, his major-label debut, The Defeat Assassinated, made an appearance on Columbia Information. In 2000, he released a three-volume series called The Loa Task. Cam dropped Honeymoon vacation, a smooth combine album that mixed jazz and underground hiphop, on the close of 2001.