Hypnotically tapping, pressing, sliding and twiddling his way to a cohesive artistic statement, Blue Mountains hip-hop producer Tony Kabanov recently released an independent, instrumental, debut album on December 3rd, as Caustic Yoda. Primarily known for his production and beat-making work with Cooking With Caustic, Two Toes, Otherside, Bomb Threat, and Goro, Tony abandoned the use of a DAW, or Digital Audio Workstation, to record live versions of the ten refined experiments that comprise Mutant Beats. In essence, this release is a live album, free from the dehumanising tediousness of computer technology. A DAW was only used in the recording of these tracks, capturing the genuine sound of gear such as Tony’s trusty turntables and such advanced synthesiser technologies as a Live MIDI Pad Controller, an Elektron Digitakt, and a BOSS Digital Sampler. Whilst being a DJ at heart, a busy syncopation of limbs and an absence of automatic time-keeping hardware got Tony thinking like a drummer. He actually overdubbed a small amount of drums on this release, too, along with a few organic recordings of percussion, synth, and some other things. Remarkably, these are all common practices for electronic music producers who wish to elevate their creativity away from the constraints of screens.
As Tony described his process, he told us that Mutant Beats was created by “live hardware sequencing a bunch of loops to make a song on the fly and record it live”. Furthermore, we’re told that listeners are encouraged to conduct their own sonic experiments by playing vinyl of the album at different speeds. “[The pieces] are all pretty slow and are made from sounds pitched down a long way, so speeding them up can go far”, Tony says. “They’re kind of designed for DJ’s to mess with. They aren’t intended for rappers. It’s not genre specific. This is intended as instrumental music, to be listened to as is.” Although one could easily envision the likes of Otherside’s Hammy or Wise Guy spitting bars over the majority of the album’s slow ‘boom-bap’, certain stand-out tracks like ‘Anti-Matter’, ’Scuba Suite’ and ‘Juno Landing’ transport these pieces to a different plane of expression. Fulfilling Tony’s integral intent, the offbeat density and ambient psychedelia of instrumental spontaneity allows this music to form perfect mental landscapes.
• ORIGINALLY WRITTEN FOR THE HAZE MAG, DECEMBER 2019