Square Wave documents an emerging community of contemporary musicians trafficking in electronica, hip-hop, and avant-garde. In an age where any beat geek or tech head can be a producer, technology has given rise to scenes and collectives in unlikely locales; Square Wave is a space for those communities to reach a global audience.
Ta-Ku can’t stop making. In the past couple of months alone, the Perth, Australia producer did official mixes for Brainer Magazine and Ampsoul, dropped a beat tape of odds and ends called Scraps, a collaboration with MC Bobby Blunt, a with Pavel Dovgal (see video below), and announced a brief four track EP for Darker Than Wax.
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Taku – Hands In The Rain ‘KT’ EP (Darker Than Wax 003) by DARKERTHANWAX
This time last year, he had just completed a project with New Zealand’s Haz’ Beats for which the duo produced a beat for every day in the month of June. 30 beats in 30 days would leave any beatmaker sick of his own set up, but it just invigorated Ta-Ku further. A couple months later, he dropped a collection of nearly thirty beats inspired by J Dilla, his very own collection of soulful, bass-heavy Donuts. In April he dropped a beat tape for Soulection called 24, on which he squeezed out as many beats as he could in 24 hours. The tally hit 13 (good ones) at midnight, and the tape was being heard the next day.
The typical lulls and blocks in creativity that inflict every artist on the planet at one time or another seem to have no effect on Ta-Ku. Within each of his conceptual works, there is a maintained quality of beats that, while never earth-shatteringly radical in style, are uniformly smooth and slick and head-bobbing. Like Onra and Dibiase, two of his confessed favorites, Ta-Ku makes music of classic hip hop influence that walks the line between sanity and noise, occasionally adopting the currently popular rhythmic abstractions that make this kind of music hard to dance to.
Brownswood Electric, Gilles Peterson’s tastemaking compilation, dropped its second volume at the end of June and, sure enough, the opening track is Ta-Ku’s. It’s a matter of a few more essential checkpoints before Ta-Ku goes from being that prolific beatmaker whose name keeps popping up on production credits to a kingpin of the global instrumental hip hop scene.
If you’re feeling Ta-Ku, it behooves you to hear some of the other cats from the island he’s repping. Hear some sounds from Adelaide’s Slamagotchi and Melbourne’s Galapagoose,
