If you’re keeping up with your favorite blogs/tumblrs covering “cloud rap” like Space Age Hustle then you’ve undoubtedly already heard this excellent collaborative mixtape from Shady Blaze and Squadda B. Unfortunately, I suspect that’s an all too tiny segment of the population.

Shady’s rapping is a welcome change of pace (literally, if you make it about halfway through the tape) from the recent solo Squadda offerings available. Meanwhile Squadda’s production is top notch as usual, but he really ups the ante with the most massive dubby bass I’ve heard from an American musician in a longtime. I had to crank down the EQ when I played this on my stereo to avoid blowing out the speakers.

What really stands out here is the similar sort of promise that dubstep offered before everyone in the U.K. got bored and started doing “funky” — creating emotionally deep music coming from a post-rave experience. Squadda’s production features all sorts of odes and nods to rave music, like the pitch-shifted, looped vocals, the stabby synth riffs, and the general feel of music that is very much fueled by ecstasy (which also had a huge impact on shoegazer, another sort of critical aesthetic point of reference). It’s hardly surprising you would see these sorts of shared cultural experience come out of Bay Area rap; when it seemed like hyphy might break out into the mainstream one of the strategies pursued was to change songs about thizzing to songs about drinking beer, or whatever. It all ends up reaffirming that line by Jean Baudrillard in America about how anything that Europeans are capable of imagining is going to inevitably show up in California.