This Is Book's Music

There’s a somewhat unspoken spirit amongst hip-hop producers in the digital era where an anything-goes approach exists. While you have one section that wants to copy anything and everything that sounds like Dilla or Kanye West, you have others who look at sampling as a continued way to not only exploit the endless catalog music to sample from, but to do it without fear of being sued. Not that artists can’t be sued, but if it’s not going to sell or be noticed as much as Kanye West, most artists are safe from being slapped with lawsuits. This is the mentality of the new album by Latimore Platz, who raids the Smokey Robinson catalogto come up with Smokey Part 2 (Weightless Recordings).

Hailing from Columbus, Ohio and released on Blueprint‘s Weightless Recordings label, Latimore Platz represents the new phase of Columbus hip-hop production, even though he has been doing his thing for a few years. Just as Blueprint himself has taken on projects by using samples of a particular artist, the use of Smokey Robinson samples (and not the usual suspects) shows that diverse and eclectic hip-hop production can still happen today, at a time when some will tell you anything and everything has already been sampled. No, most have only heard about 1 percent of the world’s archived sounds.

What Smokey Part 2 offers is a chance for people to not only Smokey songs flipped around, but to know what Latimore Platz is capable of, whether it’s a nice street track to something that would probably make Ke$ha faint. It might be too much for her, but for everyone else, this is some damn good beats.

(Smokey Part 2 can be downloaded for free by heading to Printmatic.net or clicking the Bandcamp player below.)