Today we end the week with some dark and lo fi beats. Flea Market Funk has a sweet spot for underdog producers. The vision of them sitting in their room, chain smoking cigarettes, pulling drums from charity shop records and chopping them up on the MPC or SP, then doling them out to their mates to spit over gets us right where it counts. In this case, UK producer Fish puts together not a ” selection of badly mixed LO-FI rap”, but a carefully selected LP of dark beats with rappers such as Elliot Fresh, Doctor Zoots, Tableek, and featuring artists like KISTA, as well as remixes by Fish himself. If you like UK rap, good beats, and great samples, you will love this record. File it under some over there shit, but don’t dismiss it because it’s not the norm. This collection of beats and remixes is exactly what you need on a Friday night driving around in your Rover, looking for the next spot to hit with your mates.

On “Underwater”, it’s as if Fish sat in a room with the “Paid In Full” Cold Cut remix on, slowed down to -8 and said “these are perfect drums”. Guess what? They are near perfect, and this moody intro sets the pace for the rest of the album. Now if I can only get “this is a journey, into sound” out of my head. Highlights include the Fish remix of Doctor Zoots “Test Tube”, a beat that Kool Keith would be proud of rapping over (hard 90’s drums), and his re-edit of Kista’s “Talk with God”. The claps are dope and the synthesizer sample stand right out. The instrumentals get me though. Whether it’s the eerie Black Sabbath “Wizard” sounding riff on “Banco”, the synthy pops and clicks of “Nine Two Point Seven”, the trippy, mesmerizing flute and Champion Sound snippet in “Greener”, the under stated bass line and horn stabs on “Pp90”, or the soundtrack inspired “Winter No More”, I’d like to hear more of these as an all instrumental record. If Fish has these kind of beats for a remix record, I’m sure he has enough to put something like that together. So let’s see if he’s got forever more in his bag, because that’s what I want: more of Fish’s beats.

Get the record here.

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Keep Diggin’!