A hip-hopper lets his rock roots show

LAWRENCE Muggurud is not quite who you think he is. He’s DJ Muggs, all right, arguably the world’s greatest hip-hop producer, creator of the unforgettable cinematic beats behind Cypress Hill’s “How I Could Just Kill a Man,” House of Pain’s “Jump Around” and Ice Cube’s “Check Yo Self.”

But behind the hip-hop there’s another persona: that of a space rocker.

That is, “Dust,” his new solo album on the independent Anti label, feels more like a rock record, with singers instead of rappers, trippy verse instead of R&B; hooks, and beds of ambient sound instead of banging.

Its 14 tracks sometimes build in great electronic solar flares like an early Pink Floyd record, sometimes shimmer like Cocteau Twins, sometimes drift into dialogue like an Ennio Morricone soundtrack. Some of it sounds like Muggs coming full circle to explore Bristol trip-hop like Massive Attack, which many say he inspired in the first place.

“I consider it like a psychedelic rock record,” says Muggs, chomping on shrimp and rice in one of two tricked-out lounges in his Burbank compound. “It’s like the beauty of Sade and the heart and darkness of a Black Sabbath record combined.”

“I grew up with rock,” he adds. “Before I even started listening to hip-hop, which was probably ’79 when I bought my first records, my uncle was a hippie. He had black lights and velvet posters and lava lamps and eight-track tapes and beads, and he smoked. And we shared the same bedroom. I think all those visuals and that sound of music has always inspired me.”

The new studio seems a good place for reinvention. Outside, it’s another sun-stained corner of boulevard sameness. But in the rear of a nondescript, gray, cinder-block building, down a shoulder-wide alley, past a buzzer and through a wooden gate, lies a full studio bustling with men in track suits, children, Weimaraners and pit bulls.

Muggs bought the place to give Cypress Hill a permanent studio and to give himself some freedom to forget hip-hop.

In the late ‘80s, when Muggurud, an Italian American from Queens, New York, moved to L.A.’s volatile South-Central district and met the crew that would become Cypress Hill, those roots defined his sound.

When making beats, his first inclination was to grab blues and psychedelic rock records. This added a louche yet cinematic quality to the music that set him apart and added complexity to Cypress Hill’s hard banging.

Cypress Hill went on to sell 13 million copies of its five main studio albums. Beginning in 1997, Muggs began farming out beats to other rappers too, which he has released on two Soul Assassins discs to date, and which also have yielded hits.

But it was Muggs’ idiosyncratic interludes between tracks, little smoked-out, crackly bits of delicate stoner beauty, that were the genesis of “Dust.” He’s always wanted to stretch those out, but they were too slow for rapping. When Cypress Hill took a needed one-year break, Muggs pounced.

He assembled the tracks slowly, working sometimes for months for the right details, then brought in singer Amy Trujillo, whose sweet, languorous voice gives this down-tempo ambience a solid center, and former Buckcherry vocalist Josh Todd, who finds a new, folky identity here. “This album, to me, isn’t 14 songs. It’s one song,” Muggs says, “with different scenes, like in a movie. It was very inspired by Ennio Morricone, those Italian soundtracks.”

“At first I didn’t get it at all,” says Rob Hill, who mixed “Dust” and engineered for Korn, Queen and Jackson Browne. “Then, slowly, it all began to make sense. The vision came together. Muggs had it all in his head.”

Now that he’s got the “Dust” out of his head, Muggs is rolling on new Cypress and Soul Assassins records at the same time.

“I think I’d have been done making hip-hop records if I couldn’t have made this album right now,” he says. “But now it’s like I’m making hip-hop for the first time.”

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DJ Muggs

Where: Rootdown at Gabah,

4658 Melrose Ave., Hollywood

When: Tonight, 9:30 (Muggs’ portion starts at midnight)

Cost: $8

Info: (818) 759-6374