Rick Rubin has spent the past three decades digging for talent, from his formative years founding Def Jam and defining rap aesthetics with Russell Simons, to his stretch with American Recordings casting metal and sharpening his edge. He's persisted in a way that many of contemporary super-producers haven't: as Will Welch noted in the FADER in 2004, "Rubin's credits are so diverse that any self-respecting music freak probably hates at least half of the records he's produced." Today, there are more new artists afloat than any self-respecting music freak has time to digest, but Rubin's ears are still to the streets, and if you've been watching closely, he's started pulling a new class of genre-benders into his fold, bringing them out to his Shangri-La Studios in Malibu, CA to riff on existence. Whether we hear any new tunes come of these sessions or not, its dope to see one of the greatest record men of our time is stuck on the same Soundclouds we are.