Boy Eats Drum Machine Creates Boomboxxx

Boy Eats Drum Machine as you might guess, is not a incense loving folk trio. Oh no, Boy Eats Drum Machine is the one man sampledelic turntablist known as Joh Ragel. A crate digger by day and a beat master by night, this is a guy that can make your grandfathers records sound as if they were the coolest things you've ever heard and it seems as if he's done that ten times over on his new album Boomboxxx.

Sounding something like DJ Shadow meets a torch singer in a dance club on a rainy night, Boy Eats Drum Machine creates abstract mash-ups of beats, breaks, and strange melancholy vocals. The results are something that's moody and trippy in a mashed up beat fueled downtempo frenzy. It's almost as if She Wants Revenge got really depressed and found themselves making strange music that wasn't so gothic.

Boomboxxx is an interesting listen because it really doesn't seem like it should make any sort of sense, but here is Boy Eats Drum Machine making sense out of tunes that utilize a hip hop template and then are warped significantly into some super strange pop format that sounds almost more Bjorkian than Bjork. Strange rhythms and samples fly out of every direction and are pulled into the mix by drum beats and basslines that plod along as if they were marching to a different drummer, which is the point, I suppose. With strings, saxophones, eerie otherworldy samples, broken synthesizers, and a stack of break samples, Boy Eats Drum Machine assembles each of his songs into a patchwork quilt of strangeness that makes some sort of aural sense.

Jon Ragel, as Boy Eats Drum Machine, has made a masterfully bizarre crate digging, sampledelic masterpiece. While this isn't as genius as your normal DJ Shadow record, Boy Eats Drum Machine's abstract improvisations and melancholic vocals definitely give him a run for the money by making something that shouldn't be accessible rather listenable. Anyone interested in knowing how you can make songs out of other songs should study this record as if they were being graded on it.