Lukid

Whoever Lukid is, he's not sharing much: "I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth," he avers on his MySpace page. What energies he spares on his public persona have clearly found their way straight into his productions, because his sample-heavy, groove-intensive collages display a rare sense of focus for a producer just starting off his recording career. Like artists as diverse as Madlib, J Dilla, Theo Parrish, Jan Jelinek, Flying Lotus and Dettinger, much of Lukid's dynamism comes from the friction created when samples rub up against each other just so. His beats, clearly indebted to Dilla, lurch to and fro; stubby bass lines recall the blunt impulses of Dabrye or Prefuse 73. But there's more to Lukid than just boom-bap swagger or trip-hop's head-nodding cool. His samples of jazz and computer music can be disarmingly delicate, though sometimes they reveal startling tensile strength, pulling together the merest handful of glitches into constructions so sturdy they seem almost inevitable. Otherworldly and entrancing, Lukid's reveries are precisely what headphones are made for.