Hyperdub may be renowned for its high quality output but they seriously upped their game with their first release of 2011. Like seriously upped. Now London based Morgan Zarate is defnitely no newcomer to the scene for those who haven’t heard of him. Long time member of electronic trio Spacek, producer for Ghostface Killah, Dizzee Rascal, Eska, Frank N Dank, Raphael Saadiq to name a few and has worked on worldwide campaigns for the likes of Nike. Quite a list of achievements if you ask me.

Warming the seat up for an expected album dropping later this year Morgan drops a 3 track EP titled ‘Hookid’ drawing influences from Grime, Dubstep and the LA beat scene, all whilst capturing the essence of all 3 immaculately with pristine production. The opening track Hookid is a perfect example of this. Taking the melodic aspects of  ‘purple’ dubstep that we’ve grown to love from Joker and Taz, thrown with drum patterns reminiscent of Hudmo and Fylo, then arranged to fit a more UK sounding style Morgan strikes gold with perfect peak time anthem that in my opinion should cause as much stir as ‘Wut’ did. The second track on the ep titled ‘Bye Buy’ goes for a more experimental approach with a slightly broken shuffled beat, pitched up vocal snippets and a pulsating melody that carry the song throughout before breaking into an exuberating finale. ‘SP’ the last song on the EP may be only roughly a minute in length and wildly different to the first two tracks but Morgan makes it works and pulls off a track that I can imagine being used to soundtrack the ‘getting ready’ scene to some big showdown in some low budget 80’s action movie. Not to say this track sounds low budget at all though. Production is tight a hell. As a whole this EP has to be one of my favourite releases in ages and I congratulate Hyperdub on an excellent signing. More of this please Kode 9!  Stream the title track Hookid below and get the whole release here. Also a quick addition to the post. He recently did a mix for URB filled with lots of TRUANTS favourites such as Mweslee, James Blake, Wiley, Kingdom and The Dream which you can download beloooooow.

Stream: [wpaudio url=”http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13411878/Hookid.mp3″ text=”MORGAN ZARATE – HOOKID” dl=”0″]

Download: MORGAN ZARATE – URB MIX