I had intended on writing a lengthy blog about one of my favorite music producers (of any genre), Blockhead. Unfortunately, time has gotten away from me and weeks have passed since I first set fingertip to key on this topic. So I have decided instead to include my initial scribblings on the subject and leave it at that.

Anyway, you can also listen to my all-time favorite Blockhead song, The Strain (I probably listen to it at least three or four times a week), as well as Four Walls from his latest album “The Music Scene”. I’ve also included some of the songs that either influenced or were sampled in Blockhead’s music. Seems to me that any person who can seamlessly combine Johnny Preston’s Running Bear with a comedy bit by Nichols and May deserves a respectful nod and kudos. And because of Blockhead’s “Four Walls” — which uses the now loathed vocoder/autotune, although I still really like the song — I was introduced to Eddie Holman. Holman’s concise version of Four Walls is both haunting and instrumentally divine. It does in less than three minutes what most songs never come close to doing in twice that amount of time.

There’s a scene in the Michael Mann film Heat where the following words are spoken:

You sift through the detritus. You read the terrain. You search for signs of passing, for the scent of your prey, and then you hunt them down. That’s the only thing you’re committed to. The rest is the mess you leave as you pass through.

To me, these words (enviable writing, by the way) accurately describe DJ and producer Blockhead. I first encountered Blockhead’s production chops in the fall of 2001. The album was Labor Days, the rapper, Aesop Rock. I had a four hour plane ride from Nashville to San Diego and was so enthralled with the album, both lyrically and musically, that it turned out to be the only cd I listened to during the entire flight. In fact, I spent most of my drive time in San Diego listening to Labor Days over and over and over again, seriously knocked out by what I was hearing. I have been enthralled by Blockhead’s music ever since.

Sift through the detritus, read the terrain. People like to goof on sampling. Many think of it as nothing more than petty theft. But it takes a certain brilliance, a keen ear and a steady resolve to sift through thousands of records and extract a sound that fits perfectly the vision you have in your head. Now imagine taking a collection of sounds and producing such a unique amalgamation that the initial artistic expression is mutated and rendered damn near unrecognizable as an altogether new emotion is evoked. To me, this describes precisely the unique and peerless skill of Blockhead.