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.

This tenth installment of the Square Wave column is less a profile of an artist and more a picture of how I come across all this weird music.

Everyone has their own way of learning about new music, and mine has always been a solitary one. It’s not that I don’t interact with lots of people who have great taste in music, I do, but as a DJ it’s always been my style to dig around on the fringes and pull up stuff that satisfies three requirements, in no particular order:

a) No one’s heard it before.

b) It mixes well with what people do know and love.

c) It’s really good.

In the past couple of years, I’ve switched over from digging for old obscure stuff to new beats by young producers all over the world. Finding music that’s being made now and discovering music that’s existed for some time are two different pleasures for me. Square Wave only talks about the new, and there are a number of blogs that are key starting points through which I’ve found some some really dope music. The very short list is the Moovmnt blog based in Amsterdam, Berlin’s Finest Ego, and 92BPM in Toronto. I don’t always like everything from these blogs, but if I follow a line from one of these places, I’ll almost definitely find something I dig.

This time around, I found a free album by a guy from Berlin called m∆lib through Finest Ego.

Each track on the record, entitled ∆∆∆, has its own artwork akin to the album cover. This is total mystery music, like some of that minimalist, crispy sounding instrumental hip hop on DJ Shadow’s Preemptive Strike; lots of voice samples, jazzy and ominous. And yeah, his name sounds like Madlib and he certainly sounds a little like Madlib, but he’s distinct enough to stay fresh. What marks this record as modern is the stuttered percussion, drunken syncopation, a little too much swing, which is a standard for instrumental beat music today (thanks Dilla). What gets me about this type of beat is that, though it’s pleasing to listen to, when you blend it in a live DJ set, it can make it sound like you’re screwing up the mix even when you’re blending it perfectly on beat. All it takes is one purposefully out of place bass drum hit repeating a couple of times, and suddenly you’re an asshole.

This record is great though. Jazzy sample use had its hey day, and you don’t hear it as much as synthesizer work from producers these days. In fact, m∆lib had a synthy but jazzy track sticking out like a sore thumb on a compilation of razor sharp, pop-your-eardrums tracks called Mad Hop, the first of which I heard earlier this year. The folks who put these together are in Warsaw, Poland.

Yeah, pretty filthy. Glitch hop, or whatever you want to call it, is a cross pollination of hip hop rhythms and really jarring IDM. It’s not the kind of stuff I usually groove to, but it’s great when you’ve got an appetite for destruction. Mad Hop‘s got a handful of comps and mixes that are worth checking out for this kind of tune.

I saw something on the Mad Hop blog that led me back to a Polish label called Asfalt Records, in existence since the mid-80s, that has released records by American acts like El Da Sensei (from the Artifacts), Dudley Perkins (under his Declaime alias), and Dam-Funk. They’ve also got some Polish lyrical hip hop that’s so derivative that it makes me cringe. It’s true that hip hop has crossed borders and people have done great things with it all over the world, adapting it to new styles that would never have emerged in its birthplace. But hip hop has also created international acts that mirror low points of the American rap mainstream. It’s unfortunate, but that’s music. Aside from the good and bad, there’s something new from Asfalt that I kind of dig.

Minoo is from Krakow, Poland. His music is dubstep-y, which can be an immediate turn-off, but it cleverly incorporates really jazzy voice and instrument samples. My favorite is the klezmer sounding clarinet at 2:43 in the track above. Not to lump Polish producers together, but this sounds like a more electronic cousin of Skalpel, a Polish production duo that revived old Polish jazz records and ended up releasing some phenomenal music on Ninja Tune. They haven’t released anything as a group since 2005, but member Igor Boxx dropped a pretty sick theme album at the end of 2010 about the bombing of his hometown of Breslau. See the horror below.

Let’s stop there.