The Music Scene (Reissue)

Blockhead has long made beautiful, emotive music based around the hip hop template, but on The Music Scene, he elevates his craft to another level. Simon puts it down to the use of Ableton, which means that rather than working from ‘one basic beat and building off it’, he has begun stringing together multiple beats and weaving them together into increasingly complex, surprising and satisfying pieces of music. While The Music Scene represents a development in Blockhead’s work, he still holds true to his basic beliefs about music and rhythm. Whereas the music scene is ‘a bastardized version of something that was already watered down’, Blockhead’s The Music Scene, like his career, is ‘the opposite of that’. By reworking, chopping and melding samples, by blending them together, Blockhead restores rather than dilutes their purity.