MOSLEM PRIEST REAL SWIMMIN'

Take a little look outside of your own culture once in a while and you will find that, truly, people aren't that different in other cultures. People are, at the end of the day and when all has been said and done, people. Wherever you go. So, of course, people are creative right across the globe – there are no exceptions. Someone somewhere is always making something interesting, in all forms of art – and for the sake of this site, we'll say ESPECIALLY music. Especially. Music, believe it or not, exists outside of the UK, outside of the USA, outside of whatever country you're from. One good example is Moslem Priest.

Real name Farhan Yassin, Moslem Priest lives and makes music in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. His name – curious and awesome as it is – comes from an incident that occurred when he was in London once, when one of my fellow countrymen yelled "Muslim priest!" at him in the street; he liked it and it stuck. I stumbled across his music when I was having a look around KL-based magazine, Gumball, for whom I also write a weekly (mostly...) article. It was his latest track that interested me the most, so I'd really like to share it with you: here is 'Real Swimmin'' by Moslem Priest.

What you'll notice at first is the strong emphasis on samples of all kinds: a constant background noise of running water attacked by the sound of a phone ringing. Then, of course, the song's namesake, the rhythmic vocal sample of "Real, real, real real real" makes its appearance throughout the track. Wobbling soft synths wibble their way through, becoming more heavily layered and intense as the track progresses; clocks provide an unrelenting tick-tock; gunshots take the place of snare hits.

It's a Dadaist take on hip hop: the down-South beats with the extreme sub-bass thundering throughout and skiffling hi-hats combine with all these strange samples – there's even a dog barking at some points – to paint the kind of landscape you'd see in a dream of some surreal domestic situation. This is a bold collage of sounds that booms right into your brain, leaving delicate touches to those who believe experimentation should be subtle; Moslem Priest does it differently.

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