Beginning a career with an all too auspicious release sets a rather high bar. It isn’t that Blue Sky Black Death were incapable of following up on the promises made early in its career, but the duo of Kingston and Young God have an ear towards such a wide swath of music that it wasn’t surprising to hear the group move into a variety of settings that were seemingly unrelated from hip hop. Based in and around San Fran as well as Seattle, the duo has been exposed to every conceivable genre caveat and subtlety. That hasn’t always yielded the strongest end product, but some of the group’s throw away tracks are better than your favorite producers.

Arriving full formed with A Heap of Broken Images, released via Mush Records in 2006, the double disc introduction to Blue Sky Black Death should have startled the rap community. Being what it was and including guest spots by folks as revered as the GURU, however, some of the left field production tactics flew over the heads of taste makers resulting in just a dash of attention being dropped on the young duo. Split between a disc of instrumentals and an album’s worth of collaborations with various emcees, Blue Sky Black Death was able to uniquely combine ambient sounds, sweltering drums and enough talented emcees to arrive at an instant classic.

The follow ups, though, weren’t really all that stellar.

Coming back with 2007’s Razah's Ladder, Kingston and Young God found a high profile partner to pair beats with. And while Hell Razah might be a respected figure in certain rap circles, the disc not only fell on deaf ears, to a great extent, it just wasn’t as strong an effort. That fact can’t be blamed on the production duo completely as Razah might not have been the best fit for Blue Sky Black Death’s brand of audio work.

Having forged a relationship with the Baby Grande imprint, the duo went to work on Late Night Cinema, just one of the innumerable releases from the group’s catalog during the 2008 calendar year. This effort, though, rightly confounded listeners. Judging from the title, it should have been all soundtrack styled work – and it was to a certain degree, but the influence of lily rock music loomed over the entire affair.

That disc wasn’t meant to be the ultimate statement from the group – I hope not at least. But collected recently and dispensed through the internets Lost And Unreleased is nothing more than an assemblage of tracks not placed elsewhere in the group’s catalog. It’s startling to hear “Beware” in that state that it’s in here and think that this was deemed inappropriate for proper release.

Over the twenty odd tracks here, the band creates a clutch of menacing beats owing as much to some sparse RJD2 efforts as any number of IDM producers currently working. There’s almost two hours worth of music here and the fact that “Heart Attack,” which features Yes Alexander on vocals, is the only clunker should prove to the uninitiated that Blue Sky Black Death has arrived. What the group does next, though, no one knows.