Marcus Pinn Has The Right To Scratch
The turntablist talks up his Boards Of Canada mixtape. +reviews of twogeebs & Action Figure 973, Lync Lone
Discerning hip-hop heads know the name Boards Of Canada. Back in the mid-to-late 1990s, the enigmatic Scottish duo of Marcus Eoin and Mike Sandison put out a handful of projects that blended off-kilter downtempo sensibilities with thematic elements drawn from cults and the occult. These beauteously pastoral yet somewhat sinister head-nod efforts included albums and EPs for UK-based electronic labels like Skam and Warp Records, the latter responsible for the pair's acclaimed full-length debut Music Has The Right To Children.
While theirs remained a studio-centric instrumental endeavor well into the 2010s and never opted to work with emcees, the oft boom-bap informed style of their works naturally appealed to those who primarily identified as rap listeners. Among this category of fan is Marcus Pinn, a onetime nationally competitive battle DJ and current go-to pick for indie rappers in need of scratch services, who stumbled upon them in 2001 while trawling the file-sharing app Kazaa for unreleased Portishead songs.
"The thing about Kazaa, you could just name a song whatever," he says of his discovery of a mislabeled and thus mysterious track. "I was annoyed at first, but as the song was playing, I was like, oh wait, no, whoa, this is good." The following year, a friend of Pinn's identified it as a BoC song, just in time for the release of their sophomore album Geogaddi. He also went back and picked up earlier records including their self-released 1995 EP Twoism, which Warp reissued in late 2002.
"Hip-hop is the predominant music I listen to–and they do drum breaks," he says of the connection their music made with him. "Most of their tempo is one, two, three, four, just like a hip-hop beat. And I'd say their average BPM might be like mid-to-high 80s."
"I made a few US finals back in my day," the Massachusetts-raised Pinn casually recalls of the regional and national events where he'd get flown out to compete and perform complicated DJ routines. Now in his 40s and living with his wife and son in New York City, he favors slower tempos that better reflect his contemporary interests as a veteran turntablist. "In my older age, I don't scratch over these super hyper beats; it's like mellow stuff."
Last year, that mature mentality led him back to BoC in an altogether new way. With his phone camera set up to record video, he tried scratching over a slightly pitched-up "Kid For Today" off of 2000's A Beautiful Place Out In The Country EP using his setup at home. "I posted it on Instagram and it got like a decent response," he says, opting next to share it on the BoC Reddit discussion board shortly before heading to bed. "It kind of, I'm going to say, went viral, blew up. I got a lot of messages or comments saying, do more, do more."
Encouraged by the response, Pinn kept at it with other BoC tracks, applying his existing skillset to these old favorites. "It just made a lot of sense," he says. "They're literally sampling vocals, chopping it up or time stretching it, which reminded me of hip-hop production and beat-making."
Acting upon these identified parallels, he started making four-bar loops from these familiar songs and applying both original scratches and samples from some of Eoin and Sandison's original sources. Once again, he shot videos of himself doing so and uploaded to the welcoming Reddit. "People really liked that," he says, soon fielding Redditor requests for .wav files of these sessions. "Finally, I was like, I should start recording these. So that's what I did."
Now decades since his first BoC encounters, Pinn has just put out a mixtape-as-homage to the group entitled Music Has The Right To Scratch. More than a mere selection of tracks from their catalog, the Bandcamp-only release acts as more of a curated collage, pulling archival material and audio ephemera from a variety of outlets into a cohesive double-sided listening experience.
"I re-recorded the first half twice," he says, citing pressing medical issues last summer that sidelined him until that November. "I started recording it piece by piece and I would listen back to it and I was like, all right, I have something here, but I have to redo these scratches, I got to reorder stuff." At the top of 2026, a healthier Pinn devoted his renewed energies to the project, expanding from his original intended length of around 18 minutes to something closer to 40 minutes long.
"It was on-and-off for about three months, but it wasn't a consistent three months," he says, citing his need to complete promised scratches for other people's projects. "It was start-stop, when it felt right to go back to it."
In addition to news clips related to the Branch Davidian religious movement and interview excerpts from BoC's 1998 BBC Radio 1 Peel Session broadcast, Pinn's tape also integrates a number of overt hip-hop components. Throughout its two sides, sampled snippets from Gift Of Gab, PMD, and Rakim classics mingle with newly recorded bespoke drops by Alaska of Atoms Family, former Warp Records recording artist Beans, and Odd Nosdam, the rare recipient of a BoC remix.
"He's the only hip-hop artist, I think, that they reached out to do multiple remixes of–and that's such a big deal," Pinn says of the latter artist, with whom he first connected with over Twitter some years ago. "There was a conversation about like race in underground hip-hop, but as a joke I was like, try going to a Historically Black College being an Anticon fan. And he liked it."
Released with the help of Philadelphia hip-hop artist Zilla Rocca's homegrown Three Dollar Pistol imprint, which previously distributed Pinn's first official album Night Music, the physical cassette edition of Music Has The Right To Scratch sold out in a matter of hours. A pay-what-you-like digital version remains on Bandcamp for everyone else.
Though entirely unsure if anyone in Boards Of Canada has heard the mixtape, Pinn concedes that someone at Warp Records is probably aware of it by now. Copyright concerns, especially in this digital era, factored into his release strategy, not looking to get dinged on streaming platforms. Yet with increased attention fixed upon the duo, having just released Inferno, their first album in roughly a dozen years, he hopes that nobody on that end tries to get Music Has The Right To Scratch taken down.
But if they did, Pinn gently jokes, his enhanced knowledge of the band's secrets could be weaponized in retaliation. "I know so many of the Boards Of Canada samples, and I'm almost certain they haven't paid [for] every one.
"So, like Nino Brown in New Jack City, if I go down I'm taking you down with me."
twogeebs & Action Figure 973, Surprise Motherfuckers
New Jersey is about to get a reputation for masked rap excellence, as enigmatic Garden State denizens twogeebs and Action Figure 973 combine in a one-rapper-one-producer mode. Apparently recorded in over a three day stretch, Surprise Motherfuckers puts the former over beats by the latter in an unexpected matchup where cinematic hustle logic and hood horror business reign supreme. Despite the summertime drop, chill-inducing songs like "Nightmares In Edison" and "That's So Raven" creep along with ice cold meticulousness at a boom bap pace. On highlight "Preaching 2 Tha Choir," the rapper offers up an unflinching survivalist perspective within the producer's cavernous grooves. From the grimy scheming of "Banned From CVS" to the emphatic heart-hardening of "How Could You," the pair don't disappoint in the slightest.
Lync Lone, Life is... Fleeting
Griselda helped Western New York hip-hop earn a national spotlight, but artists like Rochester rapper Lync Lone serve to remind why that attention is so deserved. With a laidback flow and a righteous rasp befitting a studious stoner, he recites reflectively from his book of rhymes on the commendable Life is... Fleeting. Backed by lush yet off-kilter underground productions by the likes of Killer Kane and SOO DO KOO, he broadens and narrows his horizons on narcotized cuts like "Shroomwich" and "Voodoo." He tokes with much on his mind for the vibey "Executive Decisions" and the swaggering "Monroe Ave." Other local notables, namely Buffalo rappers Brother Tom Sos and Elcamino, represent for the region on the deeply jazzy "Life's A Trip" and the inherently soulful "Fidelio," respectively.
Three new tracks to snack on...
S!LENCE & Tenten, "Issey Miyake Trainers"
Cartel Madras & Jide, "EVIDENT 2 ME"
BLUEHILLBILL & Boneweso, "SEEMEINTHEHURSE"
