Breakestra is a funk band that Bay Area hip-hop luminary Peanut Butter Wolf discovered playing in an L.A. club and promptly signed to his Stones Throw label. What piqued Wolf’s ears was not only the overwhelming tightness of the players and the James Brown-esque barks of the singer, but their…

Dr. Octagon is dead. Been dead for almost four years now. The all-star project was great during its brief life span — Kool Keith’s pornographic science-fiction delusions, Dan the Automator’s way, way left-field beatsmithing and Q-Bert’s playful scratch routines were just what the dour hip-hop scene needed at the time…

Just as with the physical universe, experts these days can’t seem to agree about whether the hip-hop universe is shrinking or expanding. On the one hand, the music and the culture itself appears to be splintering into an infinite number of subgenre atoms that drift farther away from each other…

As a result of its de-genderizing baggy pants aesthetic and sometimes not-so-tangential connection to the drug Ecstasy, the rave movement has generally downplayed and even ignored the inherent sexuality of dance music. Techno and its often disembodied variants, though, were not able to fully subvert the shallow lustfulness inherited from…

The hip-hop community has been anticipating the coming of Slum Village’s commercial debut with the same fervor Christians await the availability of a newly discovered gospel. And like the arrival of a sacred text, there were countless unauthorized versions and unlabeled bootlegs floating among believers for months before its official…

Rasco and Planet Asia, two of underground hip-hop’s most consistently solid MCs, united under the alias Cali Agents with the lofty intention of making high-quality rap music commercially viable again. Both having established themselves on their own — The Source voted Rasco’s debut solo album “Independent Record of 1998,” while…

One afternoon, Brian Transeau received a phone call that would forever change his life, and without exaggeration, the nature of dance music all over the world. “I was making records out of my bedroom in Maryland, never having heard English club music, and came up with [my first album] IMA,”…

Stefan Betke of Berlin started the ~scape label after his own work (recorded under the name Pole) sold beyond anyone’s expectations, turning him into one of the few experimental electronic music producers recognized by anyone outside the insular “Intelligent Dance Music” community. After wowing critics and fellow studio maestros alike…

Back in the early ’90s, music constructed out of the breakbeat branched into two distinct factions: hip-hop and drum and bass. Separated by the Atlantic from their stateside counterparts and responding to their own socioeconomic conditions, British drum and bass producers bred a different kind of animal altogether — twice…

It takes an unusually patient hip-hop enthusiast to be a Blackalicious fan. Collectors of the Oakland (by way of Sacramento and Davis, California) twosome’s product have had some serious drought years to deal with, getting through the lean times by putting stubborn faith in the maxim “quality over quantity.” Over…