10.4 Rog at SXSW 2010; photos by me

Renton's 10.4 Rog (pronounced "ten-four rodge," aka Roger Habon, Jr.) is a young artist currently cutting his teeth as a film director and album/mixtape track producer. With his signature style still very much in-development, he's blooming before our eyes, trying out indie-rock one day and hardcore hiphop the next, exhibiting rare artistic scope and rarer talent.

He's on a winning streak with his remixes. Here are four of my favorites.

"Bodies That Matter" by Multo (10.4 Rog reinterpretation)

Multo is virtually unknown UW PhD student Allan Lumba doing pretty indie-pop. I blogged about his "My Greedy Openings" song a few months ago, which sounded to me like Spoon. New song "Bodies That Matter" debuted last weekend on his blog and Tumblr with "Be My Baby" drums grounding a sparsely arranged, sighing-cum-wailing mix of keys, guitars, and Lumba's falsetto voice positively waterlogged with reverb.

For his version, Rog takes the voice and leaves the rest, treating Lumba's double-tracked, lightly harmonized vocal performance with the slightest of touches: Twinkly bells, chimes, Lawrence Welk organ, barely-there rim shots, and the occasional big-echo snare. Two-thirds of the way in, he hits a stride, ramping up the drums to a walking tempo and arranging the bells into hypnotic arpeggios, and for a few moments, the song is fully his, or he and Multo are fully a team, and the song becomes a full-on snowglobe pillowfight, a little slice of heav'n that sounds like a '60s girl group despite the computers and sequencing involved.

"Up Early In Em" by Mash Hall (10.4 Rog "Wrong Side of the Bed" remix)

This is just a total headbanger. I heard Rog called it his "ode to bass," and if that's true, it's accurate: The remix is mostly percussion booms underneath all-star rapping from some of Seattle's finest.

The beat comes off super simple, but Rog took time with the songwriting, adding a nod to Mary J. Blige's "Real Love" when Spaceman raps about it — the instantly-recognizable organ vamp comes out of nowhere and is a delightful tangent — and inserting a snippet of the original song's five-note melody to respectfully acknowledge its existence. His drums are unusual and varied, sometimes a splash-crack, other times a thud or a snap, but bass is the star of the soundscape, alternating between a stiff two-note rhythm and a righteous plunge into pummeling 808 territory.

What's best about the remix is that it reveals how good the rapping always was on "Up Early In Em." The original composition (by Mash Hall rapper/producer blesOne) is catchy but for whatever reason stops the vocals from registering clearly. I never noticed it until I heard Rog's version, and then suddenly was like, whoa, yeah, these dudes (and woman) are rapping their asses off. It's a city-wide posse cut — Mash Hall representing Capitol Hill, Spaceman the Central District, Tay Sean Beacon Hill — and nobody slacks. Tay Sean has maybe the best verse, rapping about how he wakes up early in the morning to get his "durn cheddar" and rolls his Optimos inside out because they burn better. But everybody kills it: Janae Jones, blesOne, Gatsby, Tay Sean, Spaceman, and Ronnie Voice. The concept is loosely that these are the hardest working rappers around, that they wake up early and get the worm, and the song actually sounds like it. Everybody's in fighting shape.

"Just So You Know" by Helladope (10.4 Rog "Dub Puddlestepper" remix)

Beacon Hill's Helladope has been closing its sets with Rog's version of this song lately, which is a serious statement of appreciation. A devastating dub flip of last-year's surprise classic two-stepper, I've blogged about it several times.

"Raise it Up" by J Dilla (10.4 Rog remix)

In which Rog pulls a Hunter S. Thompson (a la the gonzo journalist's retyping of "The Great Gatsby") and reverse-engineers a Detroit classic. It's more a cover than it is a remix. I wrote about it previously.

This post benefited from convo with B.Ivers