Mush Tour

Along with the Anticon collective, L.A.’s Mush Records is bringing large doses of head-scratching weirdness to hip-hop’s underground. This label package tour features motormouth raconteurs Busdriver and Radioinactive (as the Weather), stoned free-associator AWOL One, and ethnodelic-dub agitator Andre Afram Asmar, all of whom are supporting strange and fascinating new albums. On The Weather, paranoid-android wordsmiths Busdriver and Radioinactive flow like a stenographer’s nightmare over some of the most peculiar sonic constructions (courtesy of Daedelus) ever to be filed under Hip-Hop at the record store. Much-lauded L.A. MC AWOL One recently expanded heads with producer Daddy Kev on Slanguage, a surreal indie-hop/free-jazz/spoken-word opus that ought to come with a bong. Andre Afram Asmar’s challenging Racetothebottom CD proves that not all world-music-and-dub hybrids have to possess a dull sheen; you can feel the sand in Asmar’s tough beats and taste the hash in his spacey, dubbed-up soundscapes. Whether this is the proverbial next-level shit for which y’all have been waiting is debatable, but these artists will surely challenge your preconceptions of what hip-hop is in 2003.