Music / Keith LeBlanc

Keith LeBlanc is a drummer and producer who got his start in the house band of Sugar Hill Records, along with bassist Doug Wimbish and guitarist Skip McDonald. He had a solo career making Industrial music, often overlapping with Tackhead and Fats Comet (two projects consisting of his Sugar Hill accomplices and producer Adrian Sherwood). He had a short-lived record label, Blanc Records, on which he released some of his later work.

More info about Keith and his works can be found on the On-U Sound In The Area fan website.

Discography:

• "No Sell Out" (as "Malcolm X") (1983)
• Major Malfunction (1986)
• Tasteless Cuts (as "DJ Spike") (1989)
• Stranger Than Fiction (1989)
• Raw (1990)
• Invisible (as "Spike") (1991)
• Time Traveller (1992)
• "Stop the Confusion" (as "Malcolm X") (1983)
• Global 2000 (as "Spike") (1994)
• "Global Game" (as "Interference", with Bomb the Bass) (1994)
• Freakatorium (1999)
• Stop the Confusion (Global Interference) (2005)
• Tunes From The Vault (2021)
• 12 Movements of Boom (2022)
• Boom Instrumentals (2022)
• "Common Enemy" (2023)

...As well as several sample kits and drum loop collections, of less relevance and tropability.

Keith LeBlanc's music provides examples of:

• Call-Back:
  • In Stranger Than Fiction, "These Sounds" ends with a backwards sample of the drum track from "Steps", which appeared 5 tracks earlier.
  • In Major Malfunction, the end of "Technology Works" is a downbeat version of "Move".
• Crapsack World: The world becomes this in Stranger Than Fiction, with "Taxcider" depicting a cyborg in a barren wasteland executing two people and continuing "in search of the bunker," and technology seemingly taking over the world in "Mechanical Movements".
• Dropped-in Speech Clip: Portions from speeches by Malcolm X are sampled throughout "No Sell Out".
• Epic Rocking: The title track of Time Traveller clocks in at 12:44.
• Genre Shift: Time Traveller abruptly changes from an industrial album to a jazz/prog album at the end of Side A.
• Green Aesop:
  • "Dream World" is about the effects of climate change and how they're dismissed as unrealistic.
  • "Men in Capsules", though it's mostly Played for Laughs, mentions the ozone layer "looking like a burned-out sponge."
  • "Green Theory", as suggested by the title.
  The planet is fragile
  And so are living things
  So don't you know
  The green theory?
  The green theory
  The green theory of life
• Mind Screw: The first track of Major Malfunction, "Get This", is a sparsely arranged two-part song featuring a heavily distorted snare, and a flurry of backward vocal samples that override the left stereo channel. It ends mid-bar.
• Miniscule Rocking: "I'll Come Up With Something", clocking in at 48 seconds. (It's actually an excerpt of an unreleased remix of "King of the Beat" by Tackhead, as revealed by Jethro R. Binks).
• Mood Dissonance: The titular line of "Dream World", combined with Doug Wimbish's bass flourishes. The song itself is about climate change denialism.
• Pretty Fly for a White Guy: His first single was credited to, and sampled the words of, Malcolm X, which garnered some controversy. As far as hip-hop goes, though, he got his start as a drummer for early hip-hop label Sugar Hill Records.
• Rearrange the Song: From Major Malfunction, "Heaven on Earth" and the second half of "Get This" are both rearranged forms of "Be My Powerstation" by St. Ché (which Keith programmed the beats on), with "Get This" being stripped down enough to deprive it of any similarity to "Heaven on Earth".
• Remix Album:
  • The first side of Time Traveller is mostly this, being unmarked remixes of songs Keith has worked on in the past.
    • "Split the Planet" is a remix of "Free South Africa" by Tackhead.
    • "Major Drum" is a remix of "The Resistance of the Cell" by Mark Stewart.
    • "Ernie" is a remix of "Mind at the End of the Tether" by Tackhead; specifically the outro of the Tackhead Tape Time version.
    • "Earshot" is a remix of "Get This", from Major Malfunction.
    • "Fight the System" is a remix of "Man in a Suitcase" by Tackhead, and also includes a sample from "Taxcider" (itself also a remix of "Man in a Suitcase").
    • "Point Blanc" is a remix of "The Vision", a collaboration with Bim Sherman intended for an album that never released (but which has found its way onto several compilation albums).
    • "Howi" might be original, but the percussion largely resembles "Funk You (Radio Mix)" by Afrika Bambaataa.
  • Similarly, Raw is split halfway between original songs and remixes from Stranger Than Fiction.
    • "Mad Dub" is a remix of "Mechanical Movements".
    • "Go Go Dub" is a remix of "Dream World".
    • "Speaker" is a remix of "Comedy of Errors".
    • "Ending" is a remix of "Steps", specifically the intro.
• Self-Deprecation:
  • Side B of Major Malfunction includes a 48-second interlude titled "I'll Come Up With Something".
  • Side A of Stranger Than Fiction opens with "But Whitey", possibly as a Call-Back to the above track:
  "Let's hold it now, and see if Whitey's gonna come up with it. But Whitey had not, and was not, coming up with it."
• Sequel Song:
  • "Kill the Devil" from Raw got a sequel 22 years later on 12 Movements of Boom, named "Kill the Devil 2".
  • "Stop the Confusion" is a follow-up to "No Sell Out", and uses much of the same samples of Malcolm X. "Common Enemy" would later sample Malcolm X again, with the order of samples used being very similar.
• Spoken Word in Music: Primarily via sampling.
  • Excerpts from William S. Burroughs's tape experiments occasionally make impromptu appearances, such as in "Major Malfunction" and "Split the Planet". This is a habit shared with Tackhead and Mark Stewart.
  • "Comedy of Errors" samples Lenny Bruce's routines extensively.
  • "No Sell Out" is based around samples of Malcolm X.
  • Poet Andy Fairley occasionally contributed readings of his prose, such as in "Taxcider", "Invisible", and "Beat Goes On".