Moshe | en

Moshe (Marc Shepard) unearthed his calling as a teen in the early 90s playing underground rap and downtempo within the dank subterranean confines of the remotest dark discos on the dreary Northeastern US seaboard. This would portend his delving ever-deeper and darker places outside the increasingly insipid and unimaginative confines of the mainstream hip hop world in order to show off what he had exhumed, resplendent in its fresh-streaked filth and grotesqueness. A terse exclamation of "Wicked daahk!" in his Northern coastal drawl was all one needed to hear to know that said tune passed murky muster.

With his recondite record-collector sensibilities, Moshe quickly turned to making his own music and helping others of a similarly tenebrous sonic bent through his nascent Milled Pavement imprint. His ambitious and meticulously-curated roster grew from local to global within a short time, as he applied the same Sephardic steadfastness to seeking out like-minded artists as he did troweling tracks from the urban underground while DJing.

Despite releasing a prolific number of records on his imprint, including critically-lauded releases by Brzowski, Little Eskimo Jesus, Virtue & DJ Emoh Betta, and Zöen, Moshe’s desire to cut through the self-important, shallow dross of the music world to deliver a dose of realness remained unsated. A quickly and fully-realized collaboration with longtime label stalwart and brother-in-brutality Brzowski for their Like Woe EP (MP027) fed this hunger, giving way to a European tour where the two forged a formula of freestyle over filthstep, a particularly disgusting and depraved distillation of dubstep, much closer to both artists’ love of metal and horror than hip hop or electronica.

These fruitful and off-the-cuff, on-the-road collaborations, along with the intensely visceral crowd reactions led to Moshe’s new vision as a precise purveyor of the putrid. His set as of late is a crash course in filth and digital depravity, an onslaught of squelched bass, lurid LFOs, distorted drums and crushing drops with blind-siding transitions between dozens of tracks at a stretch. Punch-drunk patrons have reported being horrified at their own behavior after being assaulted by a recent Moshe set, as well as being prepared to have it done to them again enthusiastically.

Moshe is bringing a dizzying night of grad school-level grime and grossness, the likes of which you’d normally never deign to dance, to your local dancefloor. Come ready to be horrifically surprised, sonically subjugated and musically maligned. Oh, and bring a change of pants; you’ll thank yourself later. .