Audio By Carbonatix
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DJ Krush (aka Hideaki Ishi) was once yakuza (yes, a member of the Japanese organized-crime powerhouse). But that was before he saw the film Wild Style in the early 1980s and was taken in by the hip-hop stylings depicted in the Charlie Ahearn flick. Krush decided at that point that music was his future (and this at a time when most electronics-store salesmen in Tokyo had no idea what a mixer was). That turned out to be a fortunate decision for the electronic-music world: Hip-hop had never heard anything like Krush’s hauntingly lovely beats, and he’s since collaborated with DJ Shadow, Black Thought and ?uestlove, just to name a few. The sound of DJ Krush (due at the Bluebird Theater on Wednesday, February 22) leans toward the trip-hop end of the beat spectrum; his gorgeous mid-tempo beats flow beautifully for any MC’s rhyming pleasure — if he or she can stop dreaming long enough to spit.