October 19th, 2008 by niwa | posted in albums, beats, compilation, download, electronic, free music, funk, hiphop, jazz, soul, triphop |

While abstract hiphop and downtempo are styles which have been pushed forward mainly by the more western-oriented countries (the UK, the US, Germany and France), over the last couple of years our eastern neighbours have been catching up.

After the majority of easily gotten 60’s and 70’s US records had been sampled and re-sampled, it was only natural that producers would dig into the hardly explored world of eastern, asian and african music. This has delivered a lot of pleasurable productions by, for instance, Madlib and Oh No. But what is a better way to start diggin’ than going through your mom’s and pop’s records? Although the western guys got their hands on some nice records, the cultural natives always take it up a notch.

Although I can’t read a word on the website, last year I ran into diggin.pl. It seems to be mainly a review site for (new) releases in the field of beats and related music, and they’ve released a CC-licensed compilation of free music consisting mainly, but not only, of productions out of eastern Europe: Diggin.pl vol.01 – Diggin Deeper.

Though varying in styles, the main focus of the compilation lies on drumbeats and breaks. Starting off with the soulful track “Wstawaj” by Dustplastic which proves beyond a doubt that polish is not just some rugged coalminers language, you’re being taken on a beat-journey that also takes short stops at rock (The B.I.O. Project – Poppy Red), dance (Gong Gong – Kawabata remix) and reggae (Aldo Vanucci – Last Goodbye) stations.

Kixnare and Jon Kennedy provide the complementary boom-bap on respectively “Time Travelling” and “Space-O-Matic”, breaks are presented by Bontone and Baaba and there’s even an IDM’ish track by Lama, called “Innocent Bystander”. The rest of the tracks are chilled easy beats with mind-drifting samples.

The release comes with high-quality covers and an artist description in both polish and English. I haven’t seen vol. 2 around yet, but I’m very curious to see what the diggin.pl guys deliver next.

In the meanwhile you can check out vol. 1 here