By naming himself Run DMT and giving his albums and mixes names like Bong Voyage and Get Ripped or Die Trying, Baltimore’s Mike Collins has done a wonderful job of branding himself. Minute long fragments of sped up African guitar solos, hazy, ghostly Hawaiian luau music, overdriven tropical psych, and mournful drone music cohere together because it’s easy to imagine that this is the soundtrack to the world of a pop-culture addicted, sarcastic-about-some-things-painfully-earnest-about-others, polyglot stoner.

The music of Run DMT (and that of similar sound collagist Dem Hunger) mirrors the kind of ecstatic rush you can get just following YouTube and Mediafire links, jumping from a clip of a Sierra Leone television show to a DJ Premier instrumental to Gary Busey as “the game warden” in a matter of minutes, extracting the “oh sweet!” moments from them and moving on. Because most Run DMT songs are beat-less, the movement through genres and sounds feels easygoing, creating a chill, contemplative feeling, more like looking through a photo album than moving through stations on a radio dial.

Bong Voyage and Get Ripped and Die Trying are both available for free download on Run DMT’s MySpace, and his collaborative mix with Happy Family amanda huggakiss is available on the Wigflip label site.

MP3 :::
Run DMT – Mad Weed
Run DMT – Ramona