Eric Lau is a producer and deejay from London who has been making music for a while, working with everyone from Guilty Simpson to Georgia Anne Muldrow. Just last year, he released an excellent instrumental album called Examples. Now he comes back with the follow up to that album, simply titled Examples Volume 2.

Examples Volume 2 is what happens when a producer is a deejay as well. At one point, that just might be assumed to be the case, but things evolve, and being a producer these days doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re spinning records on the weekend. When you listen to Examples Volume 2, much like the first go around, you get an album that is neither a beat tape or a traditional instrumental album. Instead, you get this collection of short instrumental tracks that do develop a little in one to two minutes most of these tracks are, but really work well when you take a step back and listen to the album as a whole. If you just select a handful of tracks at random, you’d think you had some good beats, but they might seem a little random. Maybe one leaned more towards smooth jazz, one was a banger with huge drum hits, and one was a bit more choppy. However, and this is where his point of view as a deejay comes in, he finds a way to take this different beats, different styles of production, and creates this amazing flow with connecting points that puts everything in conversation with each other. It’s telling that both volumes were sold with digital versions that contained a continuous mix, because that’s the way that Lau always intended for you to listen to these albums. And when you do listen to Examples Volume 2 all the way through, you get this amazing guided tour through all these different production styles and influences and you get to see how they are all on one continuous spectrum.

Examples was a great instrumental album from a veteran producer in Lau when it came out last year. I’m not always one for sequels, but when you’ve got the inspiration to pull it off once again, why not? Examples Volume 2 is a great listening experience that will take up and down and all around, with a skilled producer and deejay as your guide.