For all its widespread interests and influences, instrumental hip-hop as a whole has one major rule: there must be beats and a melody. All of the sounds at play in any given track usually exist out of service to either of these two elements. That may not seem like much in the way of a limiting rubric, but just the same, it is easy to notice when someone is breaking the rules. On his new EP, Open Tuned Occidentals, Australia’s Cleptoclectics gleefully plays with hip-hop conventions. His compositions are littered with a kitchen-sink variety of sounds not customarily associated with the genre.

Opener “Move On” appears to be a statement of purpose. The track floats in on a flurry of noise; strings, woodwinds, synths, and drums rattle away seemingly randomly, like a marching band tuning before a performance. A drum beat suddenly rises out of the mire, and the instruments syncopate around it. The track finally begins to make sense rhythmically, and then it suddenly ends. “Golden Fleecing,” a stir-fry of diced samples and synths, follows suit. But just as soon as Open Tuned Occidentals gets the listener settled into a sort of Dadaist groove, quite fittingly, things shift gears. The rest of the EP traffics in a hazy, shambolic boom bap, not that far in scope from the work of auteurs like Prefuse 73 and Flying Lotus.

Judging from the more conventional material, Cleptoclectics could, if he wanted to, turn out more mannered, sonically pleasing compositions. However, it also appears that he’s more interested in the sounds of instruments sometimes than how they fit together in any rhythmic or melodic fashion. Open Tuned Occidentals is by turns an inspired pastiche of shimmering noisy hip-hop and a five-car pile-up of gonzo synths and found sounds.

-Craig Jenkins