Artist
Catbeats
Gothenburg, Sweden
Catbeats is a musician from Gothenburg, Sweden.
Biography
catbeats is the lo-fi chill-hop beats of Tanimura Midnight member and Swedish Columbia founder Shelby Cinca (also known for his work as a member of Frodus and The Cassettes). Created almost entirely on an OP-1 device then layered with a bass guitar purchased from Fugazi's Joe Lally which was primarily used in their tour van. In his own words catbeats sound is Nintendo’s Animal Crossing game meets Air and El Huervo with Fugazi’s bass!
The Arc of Catbeats
The pivots — what forced Catbeats to reinvent.
The Bedroom Beat Tape Run
Dropping the self-titled debut in 2018 set up a strict aesthetic built on warm rhodes loops and heavy sidechain compression. Projects like 'closing hour at the cat café' leaned hard into cozy, muted jazz chops and unquantized digital drum programming. It was rapid-fire output directly tuned for streaming study playlists. You hear the limitations immediately: short tracks, repetitive head-nod patterns, and heavy tape hiss used as glue.
The Melodic Field Recording Pivot
By 2021's 'Moss Magic' and 2022's 'comfy', the sound branched slightly into environmental texturing and brighter synth layers. The beats slowed down even further, burying kick drums under lush organic samples and bird sounds. It traded the dusty jazz-trio sample flips for synthesized pastoral melodies. The production got cleaner, swapping heavy vinyl grit for crisp, wide stereo reverb.
Influences
- J Dilla — Dilla's MPC3000 swing and micro-timing adjustments created the entire template for modern unquantized beatmaking. You hear it in the lazy, dragging snare placement on every early track. Without Donuts, this specific pocket of instrumental music simply does not exist.
- Nujabes — The late Japanese producer pioneered marrying sweet, melancholic jazz piano loops with steady hip-hop breaks. That exact harmonic blueprint runs straight through 'closing hour at the cat café'. It turns nostalgic modal jazz into repetitive, low-stress loops.
- Madlib — The Beat Konducta series showed an entire generation how to treat micro-length instrumental beats as standalone releases. You hear his crate-digging philosophy in the dusty loop curation and raw track transitions. He made the two-minute loop tape a legitimate format.
- Flying Lotus — His early work on 1983 and Los Angeles popularized heavy sidechain compression that makes kick drums duck the entire mix. That suffocating, breathing pump is standard operating procedure across this catalog. He took the hardware sampler approach and pushed it into modern software workflows.
- DJ Shadow — Endtroducing..... proved in 1996 that a solo producer could build an entire emotional world using only sample chops and drum tracks. The atmospheric melancholy and drum-loop focus trace back to that original blueprint. Shadow made instrumental sample-collage a complete subgenre.
Around the web
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