Yosi Horikawa's beats burble, hiss, slosh and gurgle. On his debut full-length, "Vapor," the 34-year-old producer may wield some identifiably hip-hop rhythms, but they're tangled in a rich, intricately detailed tapestry of field recordings, sampled percussion, snatches of tribal chants and warm, guileless synthesizers. It's the best thing you'll hear all year that also bears a passing resemblance to naff ethnic chill-out act Deep Forest.
"My stuff gets mistaken for healing music quite a lot," Horikawa admits. "I like nature, sure, but I'm not just looking to express something simple like, 'Let's give thanks to Mother Earth!' " He mulls the idea for a while. "When you listen to something, the surrounding environment has a big effect on you: the time of day, the landscape, the angle of the sun. ... It's not just about the sound: I want to capture the environment around the sound in my work."
Though he only considered music a hobby until recently, Horikawa has been tinkering with sound since his parents bought him a boombox at the age of 12. A keen hip-hop fan ("mostly East Coast, underground stuff," he says), the sight of rapper KRS-One using a pair of headphones in lieu of a microphone on the cover of 1993 album "Return of the Boom Bap" inspired him to try the same thing himself. Before you could say "Pete Rock," he was making recordings of improvised percussion, using a can for a snare drum and the underside of his bed for the kick.