Last week had a number of solid releases for beat junkies. Knxwledge dropped his Hexual Sealings Vol. 2 and Ta-Ku released his SCRAPS Vol.2 Regan ‘Ta-Ku’ Mathews is an Australian beat maker who states his influences are from the pioneering artists J Dilla, 9th Wonder, and DJ Premier. If you scrounge through our archives you can find an earlier post on his Dusty Instrumentals beat tape. This is one of my favorites off of the album called Kyotokyo. Reminds me of some of Teebs beats with the harp arrangement stressed as the prominent structure to the song. The entire album can be streamed off of his bandcamp page http://ta-ku.me/album/scraps-vol-2 and probably found on the internet with some good google searches.
I’m going to keep this one short and sweet, because of some formal education imposed time constraints. Two of the most talented producers in Seattle just released one of the best instrumental releases the city has seen in sometime. 
The Los Angeles beat music scene has a resonant notoriety surrounding it throughout the world. Anyone “in the know” has at least heard of the Flying Lotus’s, Daedelus’s and Gaslamp Kiler’s of the world and Low End Theory has become a household name as well. The scene churns out talented new artists from a multitude of different backgrounds like hotcakes. These artists are represented on labels like Brainfeeder, Alpha Pup and more and routinely play shows in Los Angeles and up and down the West Coast. The scene’s sound has permeated other genres and is only growing in popularity. It is no surprise then that similar scenes, centered around a regular or semi-regular gathering of heads, have began to pop up across the country over the last five years or so. One of the most engrossing of those scenes happens to be in Austin, Texas, the setting for next week’s South By Southwest festival. Hopefully in the near future, we will provide a longer feature on the Austin beat scene, but for now, this will serve as an introduction.
The Astral Plane 