A genuine artifact of the New York underground, finally rescued from obscurity and given the presentation it deserves. Originally dropped in 1998 as an extremely limited cassette, Ruff Kutz is the experimental hip-hop mixtape from Skiz Fernando Jr., the WordSound label founder who recorded under the name Spectre through a series of late-night, haze-coated sessions in Brooklyn at the exact moment the city's experimental beats scene was reaching its most fertile and inventive peak. The early 1990s had witnessed a spike in mutant strains of future dub. In Bristol, trip-hop and jungle were on the rise. In Manhattan it was noise and breakbeat. By the turn of the decade, the combination of dub, ambient, and hip-hop aesthetics had been baptized by The Wire magazine as Illbient, and Ruff Kutz is one of the defining documents of that scene, a mixtape comprising alternative mixes, obscure beats, unreleased tracks, and dub-plate specials drawn from Spectre's underground vaults and spanning the formative period between 1994 and 1998. The contributors read like a who's who of the WordSound stable and New York underground royalty: Sensational, Bill Laswell, Kevin Martin's Techno Animal project, the Jungle Brothers, Dubadelic, Scotty Hard, Doc Israel, Mr. Dead of the Metabolics, Professor Shehab as Psycho Priest, and more. Most tracks were produced or, in Spectre's own words, "reduced and jinxed," with on-the-fly basslines and drum loops lending the whole record a frayed, lopsided quality that producers have spent years trying to recreate. Pitched-down spoken word intros frame each cut like a late-night radio transmission from a different world entirely. PAN's vinyl reissue, released in 2015, was fully mastered for the first time from the original DAT tapes in their original sequence. A heady shot to the dome from late 1990s New York, and an essential piece of the Illbient story.
