Beginning as a beatmaker for Aesop Rock and other rappers on the Def Jux label, Blockhead struck out on his own in 2004 with Music by Cavelight, a set of exploratory beat suites in the style of RJD2 and DJ Shadow. He continued in the vein across subsequent records, knitting together scraps of sampled vinyl (jazz, soul, folk — whatever fit the bill) into increasingly idiosyncratic configurations, often using scraps of voices to fill the hole where an MC would normally be. 2009's The Music Scene is his most advanced offering to date, notable for the variety he packs into every song (like the glorious opener "It's Raining Clouds," which shifts from an Indian-inflected lament into a trumpet led drum 'n' bass banger) as well as across the whole album. The album shows a willingness to engage far more diverse moods than your typical downtempo outing, from devotional ("Only Sequences Change") to pissed (the metal-sampling "The Daily Routine") to doggedly optimistic ("The Music Scene," which begins with the chorus, "The music scene has got me down," and quickly kicks its frown upside down with an explosion of sitars and nimble funk bass).