The Groove Seeker: Beep’s City of the Future

On a weekly basis, The Groove Seeker goes in search of killer grooves across rock, funk, hip hop, soul, electronic music, jazz, fusion, and more.

Beep: City of the Future (Third Culture Records, 1/18/11)

Beep: “Robo Pup”
[audio:https://alarm-magazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/BEEP_Robo_Pup.mp3|titles=Beep: “Robo Pup”]

San Francisco-based trio Beep has tapped into a fresh vanguard with its upcoming release City of the Future. The indie-rock-meets-experimental-jazz trio is commanding without being loud, making the dynamics and improvisational strategies of jazz accessible to a whole new audience. City of the Future contains pieces that advance rather than deconstruct in an accomplished style that forgoes any art-school tropes narrowly associated with the experimental tag.

Produced by Eli Crews (producer for Deerhoof and Why?), the record is marked by passionate percussion and a broad sense of what a melody can sound like. Making avant garde sound closer than ever to the present, Beep has found a sound that mixes the vibrancy of the modern rock recording with the experimental subtleties of a jazz record.

Krallice: Classically Inspired, Ambient Black Metal

The members of Krallice come from a variety of backgrounds — math metal, punk jazz, death metal — but their outgrowth of black metal in a community where the genre is lacking is reminiscent of the jazz era, when new sounds were pouring out of Queens, NY.