Hudson Mohawke - Hudson's Heeters Vol. 1 (LP)

Before Butter turned club synths into cartoon fireworks and before TNGHT rattled festival rigs, Hudson Mohawke was already sketching out his world with Hudson’s Heeters Vol. 1. Released in 2006 via the Glasgow collective LuckyMe, this scrappy, swaggering beat tape still feels like a signal flare from a young producer itching to bend hip hop into new shapes. It is not a proper studio album, more a calling card, but that’s part of the charm. You hear sketches with teeth. You hear ideas bumping into each other and throwing off sparks.

Ross Birchard had form. As a teenager he’d already turned heads as a DMC finalist, so the turntablist brain is baked into these cuts. The rhythms pivot hard, the fills arrive a fraction early, and the whole thing has the jittery logic of a DJ who trusts feel over tidy grids. Synths are plastic-bright but never flimsy. Drums swing like they have lead in the soles. He was part of the same Glasgow current as Rustie, and you can hear a shared love of chip-synth colour and Southern rap heft, but Hudson’s Heeters is looser and messier in a good way. It leans into chopped R&B bits, videogame sparkle, and those cheeky half-second beat drops that make you grin before the bass returns.

What catches you now is the personality. These tracks don’t aim for polite polish. They duck, jab, and smirk. A melody might pitch up into helium, then collapse into a detuned blur. A kick might stumble for one bar, only to slam back twice as hard. There’s a home-made quality that never reads as cheap. It reads as hungry. Put it next to Butter, which arrived on Warp in 2009, and you can map the lineage straight away. The rhythmic feints, the boisterous synth leads, the way a hook arrives sideways then refuses to leave your head. Hudson’s Heeters Vol. 1 is the early notebook that already had the handwriting down.

Because it was a mixtape, it circulated in that mid 2000s way, as a CD-R passed between friends and on the internet. That meant heads found it first. The beat scene that would soon rally around low-slung hip hop and neon synths heard a kinship here. You can draw a line to the wave that followed, from Glasgow to Los Angeles, where producers were also pushing swing and sampling into strange, glossy places. It never had the press cycle of a label album, but its reputation as a cult favourite has only grown as younger listeners reverse engineer Hudson’s catalogue.

Production wise, the palette is still striking. He stacks claps so they hit like wet towels. He lets snares ring into the tail of a synth so the decay becomes part of the groove. Bass is fat yet nimble, often sitting just behind the beat, like it is teasing the next drop. He uses negative space well too. A one bar drop-out becomes a hook. Little details like that are what DJs and producers obsess over, which is why this tape still pops up in conversations about how the late 2000s bent hip hop’s grid.

A quick word for collectors. If you’re combing a Melbourne record store for Hudson Mohawke vinyl, you’ll likely pull Butter or later releases first, since those are the classic Hudson Mohawke albums on vinyl. Hudson’s Heeters Vol. 1 was born as a mixtape, so anyone hunting for Hudson’s Heeters Vol. 1 vinyl is playing a harder game. Most fans meet it digitally. If you want something to shelve, buy Hudson Mohawke records online and you’ll find a healthy run of official releases that carry the same DNA. For folks in vinyl records Australia circles, this tape is still essential listening, even if it lives on your hard drive rather than your turntable.

Part of the fun here is hearing future choices in rough form. Little phrasing tricks he would later take into big rooms are present, but they’re ringed with hiss and giddy edits. It’s like catching a graffiti artist in a notebook before the wall. You don’t need to squint to hear why big names later came calling for his production touch. The sense of melody is bold, the drums talk back, and nothing feels locked to safe presets.

If you’re coming in fresh, treat Hudson’s Heeters Vol. 1 like a time capsule and a party tape. It is the sound of a Glasgow producer testing his own limits in 2006 and finding a lane the rest of us could dance in. Not every idea lands with the same force, but that’s the appeal. You get the rush of discovery track to track, the cheeky gear shifts, and the promise of what would follow. Spin this, then jump to Butter, and the arc makes perfect sense. Even after all the festival moments and collabs that came later, the spark here still feels immediate. That’s why fans keep talking about it, and why it remains a touchstone when people ask where the modern Hudson Mohawke story really begins.