Weekly mp3 #124: David Last - Secret Society

The Agriculture label's artist page for David Last has 3 free MP3s on it, including this one.

Fertile middle ground between bumping dancehall and nerdy electronica - a heavy clave-inspired rhythm is spiced up with a range of synthetic and acoustic sounds. The main melody has a steel drum kind of feel, while a bunch of the other sounds were at least once female voices faux-scratched in staccato bursts. Great breakdown with dub fx, more riffs introduced and the bassline shifted up out of the bass register.

David Last comes from Texas, USA, and so far as I know has lived in NYC since graduating high school. Like a strange number of electronica wonks, his day job is graphic design and illustration. 'Secret Society' is from Last's 2005 debut, as with the others linked to in the first para of this post. I was originally going to link to 'Cat~Silver' (the one I heard first) but since I picked up the album a couple of years back 'Secret Society' has become a fave. Mr Last seems generally very adept at mixing up Western and non-Western elements in a way that doesn't make me think he just wanted to sound "worldly".