In honor of a new Blockhead album, here is an old one:

Blockhead: Music By Cavelight (2005)

Blockhead rose to prominence as the main beat-maker for Aesop Rock on albums such as "Float" and "Labor Days", and now resides as an instrumental artist on the UK label NinjaTune. His three full-length albums were released one year after another, this being the first. In making an instrumental album, Blockhead made the smart decision of avoiding just making beats without MCs. This allows Blockhead to soak himself in his love of slower, more introspective tempos. His greatest skill is clearly his sample-finding and layering, but his amateur side clearly shows in the atonalities and disjointedness. This album definitely sounds like a long-time coming; the diversity and uniqueness of the samples sounds like they were being saved for a rainy day, only to all be let out at once. This album would later be seen as a single step in a brand new direction for Blockhead, but alone shows him as on of the more unique "hip-hop" producers around.