With all the buzz around town about the endless possibilities at the upcoming Cover Up shows, another weekend show that might not be on the radar — but absolutely should be — is the Sunday night K Theory show at Canopy Club with ### and DJs Belly and Krucial adding local support. Most of these acts play a mix of hip hop and electronic music that are exceptionally complementary. Whoever put this lineup together did an amazing job at finding acts that all contain similar elements but still have a sound of their own.
Headlining the show is K Theory which features a group from San Francisco with an interesting approach to live hip-hop/electronic music. Dylan Lewman and Dustin Musser sample hip-hop tracks and rework them with added keyboard and effects with Malcolm Anthony providing vocals. K Theory has a ton of tracks on Soundcloud and several of the remixes feel like they are adding their own verse to classic hip hop tracks like in this Outkast remix. They take the basic structure of the hip-hop tracks but re-arrange them while introducing electronic music elements like bass rattles from dubstep or trap-style drums. That’s not to say they aren’t making original music as well, but their original tracks are similar blend of hip-hop and electronic music.
K Theory is on an upswing right now after playing all kinds of fantastic gigs in 2013 from festivals to clubs. I’m glad to see this K Theory show because I know there’s an audience out there for shows like this because the support on the bill are all folks that are from here or have played here in C-U. There are electronic and hip-hop scenes here in town and they’ve collaborated on shows in the past at Highdive and Canopy and Cowboy and Velvis many times in the past. This show would appeal to both electronic show fans and hip-hop heads. K Theory in particular combines these two especially well.
### (pound pound pound, so you don’t feel like a jackwagon when telling your friends who’s playing) is collaboration of two guys from West Lafayette, Indiana, Jeremy Rhodes and Josh Wren. They played Champaign almost a year ago at Cowboy Monkey for a Certified Dope show with Footwork. I remember their style as being high-energy (not to be confused with Hi-NRG — genres are the band names of electronic music) uptempo electro house and — one of my favorite overlooked genres — moombahton. Many of their tracks combine the two and their tags on SoundCloud reflect the lack of a single label for their sound. Their set kept the dancefloor packed with people dancing from start to finish and I have no doubt they’ll do the same at Canopy. They also played Canopy previously for a Dubstep Masquerade so they are not genre-specific, but rather they go for the vibe that connect electro house and dubstep and moombahton and trap and insert-genre-here. Their track, Simba, is an excellent example of the ### sound.
Adding local support are DJs Krucial and Belly. I hadn’t heard Krucial before so I wasn’t familiar with his sound, but his Facebook page lists Kastle and Soulection as influences. My interest was piqued. My run through his Soundcloud confirmed it: this is my jam. Blissed-out chill tracks with filtered vocal samples with a hip-hop base that swerves into trap but still stays light and airy. He has a mix with electronic tracks that I’m sure would totally appeal to the electronic music crowd on campus (Avicii, Steve Aoki, etc.), but I’m partial to this Future RnB stuff he’s got going on. Especially this bootleg track he put up from just two weeks ago:
Adding serious local weight to the bill is C-U’s DJ Belly who is the resident DJ at Radio Maria (Thursday and Friday nights in addition to running Open Decks on Wednesday nights) as well as one of the founders of Certified Dope, half of Sex n Candy, regular at Hit it Run, Soma, Mike ‘N Molly’s, and Cowboy Monkey to name only a few. Recently, Belly has been getting played a couple shows at The Canopy Club and this show in particular is perfect for his style from start to finish. One of his newest projects is Homestead Music. It’s a similar style to Krucial and very much in the vein of Kastle and Soulection as well. This is my favorite track from his newest project with only one complaint — I’d like it to be at least twice as long…
This show should NOT be overlooked when pondering your Sunday night options. Many folks might just happen to have Monday off from work and this Sunday night show is has an early start. Doors open at 8 p.m. with the music beginning at 9 p.m. Tickets are $15 day of the show, $12 in advance.