It's perhaps no mystery, though, why Means and Ways, the transcendent debut of Eric Porter Douglass' alias Afrikan Sciences—seemingly slipped everyone's attention (or rather, slipped my attention), on its release in April. Flying Lotus' freewheeling is of course, ultimately scribbled in the shorthand of a universal language, hip-hop. Douglass' preoccupation with rhythm, however, fixates on the oddities, the mutations, the dualities and instances of bare collision. His hoarded beats are gleaned from a whirlwind of origins: West London broken beat, the East Coast's '90s house, '40s jazz, indigenous African and Latin rhythms, but they're deployed concurrently and unexpectedly, with cross-beats and displacement used as accents in his own pidgin dialect.""