This left-field US hip-hop crew’s three members Dream, Non and Breaff are based in Chicago, Atlanta and Los Angeles and create their avant garde hip-hop by sending files over the Internet. ‘The Internet is another level of evolution’, claims Non of this music-making modus operandi, ‘Shadowhuntaz would exist without it but not in this form.’ Their 2004 debut’s genesis was triggered when Dutch electronic producers Funckarma (the Amsterdam-based brothers Don and Roel Funcken) contacted the trio of MCs (by e-mail, of course) after hearing their DJ Screams Medic EP on the US label Plug Research. The collaborators began sending their trans-Atlantic rhymes and rhythms via their Internet Service Providers, frequently prompting the ‘corrupt data’ error message that was to become the album’s apposite title. Together, the collaborators discharge beats and words as dense and intricate as the streams of computer code that provide their means of working, such that the album sounds astonishing in small doses and oppressive in large ones. Over the Funcken brothers’ fractured machine music, Shadowhuntaz dispense their battle raps and wrathful critiques with lines that unusually reference the founder of modern astronomy and an acclaimed maker of violins. Corrupt Data was issued by the esoteric Manchester, England-based imprint, Skam Records.