Kaidi Tatham - In Search Of Hope (2x12") 2020 (Mint (M))

Kaidi Tatham recorded this on modest home equipment in his south London flat back in 2008, but it didn’t surface until 2020, when the Tokyo label Freedom School finally released it as his first album under his own name. By then Tatham had already built a reputation through Bugz In The Attic and a long creative partnership with Dego, and the record’s rhythmic complexity — tracks routinely sidestepping straight 4/4 for shifting, layered meters — became a reference point in its own right, eventually sampled by Madlib for Freddie Gibbs’ ‘Bandana.’ What started as a bedroom recording turned into one of broken beat’s genuinely hard-to-find artifacts, changing hands for serious money before this reissue brought it back.