L.A.’s avant-garde beats scene boasts a high concentration of giddy eccentricity. There are such characters as its poster boy Flying Lotus, the dispensary-fueled scion of a radically progressive musical family, and the bassist Thundercat, who’s singlehandedly propping up the few remaining pieces of jazz funk’s credibility. And then there’s Gregory Shorter, Jr., aka Ras G, who might be the furthest out of all of them. The inheritor of an Afrofuturistic musical tradition passed down from Sun Ra and George Clinton, Shorter is the head (and apparently sole member) of something called the Afrikan Space Program. He's seemingly on a mission to gather gather up the best elements of a half-century of revolutionary black music and launch them into a utopian sci-fi alternate dimension of his own devising.
His latest salvo is called Back on the Planet, but it doesn’t feel like the work of an entirely earthbound artist. The opening title track shows off both Shorter’s artistic ambition and his formidable technical skills, with a convincing electronic emulation of the organic, frenetic crackle of an Ornette Coleman free jazz cut that evolves into a mass of irregular drumming, squealing synths, and layers of noise. It sounds like someone’s packed Coleman up in a rickety Apollo module and launched him into low earth orbit.
Back on the Planet spends its first few tracks focused on setting moods and generally avoiding the concerns of melody and steady rhythm. There are soothing arrangements of gently pulsing drums, echo-blurred keys, and the occasional sub-bass boom. Bits of roots reggae drift by, along with ambient waves of analog synthesizer, clips of audio lifted from movies or TV, and a lot of sounds that aren’t so easy to place. The songs don’t really go anywhere, but they don’t need to-- it’s the psychic tone that matters, not any sort of hooks, and the blissful state they produce comes from simply enjoying them in the moment.
It’s not until “_G Spot Connection” that the sounds start to cohere into something resembling the rap beats that Shorter is ostensibly a producer of. Once he gets focused, though, he stays that way, and the rest of Planet’s 16 tracks consist of the most radical beat deconstructions of his career. “OMMMMM” sounds like vintage Cali rap with all of the drum samples swapped out for assorted snippets of field recordings. “One 4 Kutmah” and “Been Cosmic” take throwback breakbeats and bury them under layers of raw synthesizer freakout. The minute and a half standout “Culture Riddim” revolves around a throbbing synthesizer and what sounds like a sample of someone filling a glass with water.
As freaky as Shorter's compositions get, they still knock hard like rap beats should. It’s a little hard to imagine cruising the streets blasting something like “Natural Melanin Being”, where where the tempo not-so-subtly speeds up and slows down every couple bars, but it would be a sufficiently trunk-rattling experience.
When the L.A. beats scene first broke out with a wider audience, its popularity spiked exponentially and it looked for a minute like that it might being in danger of burning out, its wild experimental edge and deep vein of genuine weirdness diluted by a legion of imitators. But Back on the Planet is proof that its vanguard is still out there-- way out there-- pushing themselves into ever wilder territory.
