Ka :: The Thief Next To Jesus
Peace be upon him. We lost a great one. I am still working through this loss.
E L U C I D :: REVELATOR
Dr. Yakub, who you might know, is on Instagram.
Moor Mother :: The Great Bailout
She got down to the nitty-gritty.
Mach-Hommy :: #RICHAXXHAITIAN
Mach moves like mercury, flips you like crypto, keeps it cryptic, the vigilante mystique, keeps you guessing: the bandana never slips, releases different songs/takes on streaming and the CD, flips you like tai chi, no lyric transcription allowed, because to him, MC means move the crowd.
It’s the voice with Mach, like a dirty trumpet, flips you like Dutch traders, Miles Davis with his back to the audience. He doesn’t duck and weave but weaves his words into the beat — shot pellet cadence, flip you like Hacksaw Jim with the 20 gauge. He doesn’t rap, he incants and decants. He floats, he appears and disappears, the Haitian apparition, flips you like Shannon Miller.
Mach always has that seething rage, bubbling like gumbo, the spitting intensity, flips you like Childline. He’s always bouncing between two magnetic poles like a supercharged particle: success, riches, fly shit; and the degradation and destruction of his Haitian homeland. This is the dude who’s still waiting for that python coat but told Thomas Hobbs he first read Leviathan when he was eight years old. Who first rapped at 13 over the Verbal Intercourse instrumental and first caught acclaim with 2013’s F.Y.I. and still flips us like bipolar depression. “What I’ve been through is not written on my face,” he said, because it’s written on here, it’ll flip you like a luchador.
ShrapKnel x Controller 7 :: Nobody Planning To Leave
If you think about it, Curly Castro and PremRock as a duo really shouldn’t work, but somehow it does, really well. They’re not a classic high/low combo like Run-DMC, B-Real/Sen or Chuck/Flav; they’re not dovetailed like EPMD or Ghost/Rae. Castro is the Iron Chef for the Iron Galaxy; Prem is cool like dat. Rugged like Rwanda vs. Berlin Tomwaitzplatz. Soundunabomber vs. a lyricist lounging. Assault on Precinct 13 vs. The Royal Tennenbaums. Tasmanian Devil vs. Pepe Le Pew. You get the idea.
But somehow the combo does connect like four, and keeps getting better: it’s down to how well they play off and counterpoint each other, their veteran skills, the contrast of their voices and flows — it’s a full metal alloy of alchemic allies. And across this record, there’s the gamut of hip hop references — laced through the genome, sometimes dominant and sometimes recessive. This comes through in the beats too, which sometimes get down to boom bap, sometimes little flourishes of classic samples, the scratches by the legendary D-Styles. Prem will check Taming of the Shrew and Twin Peaks and Castro deep X-Men cuts, but all three of them drop bottomless and sweeping knowledge of hip hop history.
What Controller 7 brings to this record makes it a whole other epic against Metal Lung and the self-titled debut. It’s an immersive mosaic of sounds, intricate and seamlessly sweeping between styles: 2k boom bap, basement jazz club, boss level Defender glitch, European avant garde orchestra. The constant beat switches are so immaculate, like each verse gets its own bespoke soundscape. In the best possible way, no one sound wears out its welcome, and there’s little sense of where each song ends and the next starts; it’s one perfectly structured listen. He fans the flames. He goes Einstein on the bitch. This record is Eldritch Meat Cleaver x Big Daddy Kerouac x The Maker of 7 Worlds That Don’t Fall Apart.
blackchai x August Fanon :: OTHERWISE A BLUR
Every year I listen to several hundred new albums, and one thing I’m always looking for is this: someone new, someone hungry, pouring it all out, a singular voice and unique vision—but also personal, the illdungsroman. Past few years these have been records like King Cobra, He Left Nothing for the Swim Back, Teddy Brown Brown, An Echo Storm Howling. blackchai’s been around a bit, and you can hear the progression across his earlier stuff — steady mobbing upwards towards this.
I can’t not appreciate an MC who pours these into his brain for an album to come out the other side: Blood Meridian, Ghostface, Jawbreaker, Haitian Body Odor, Kwame Ture, anime, Marxism, Vordul Mega. But it’s the synthesis, the spinneret in motion: he piles phrase on phrase in continuous frenetic motion, no breaks, a steady stream of syllabic torrent, a feverish brain mainlined to an adept tongue falling down fifty flights of lyrical stairs.
August Fanon is for definite a top producer at the moment, and brings his signature post-RZA throbbing soul gristle gumbo to the beats. His steady, low-key jazz loops, metronomic basslines, stabs and flourishes give a smooth surface for blackchai’s rickety-rackety running man flow, Hell Up In Harlem meets Hell Comes To Frogtown; City of God meets Across 110th Street.
k-the-i??? x Kenny Segal :: Genuine Dexterity
Mandela effect: I could’ve sworn his name had an exclamation point in it, that it was k-the-i?!? Well, it should: his flow has the wildness and urgency of a 3am bus station rant. Listen to how he dips and rolls and staggers and switches up his speed. There’s density and fluidity, chantographics, fantographics, fantastic damage, dancing fantasia, transformations, battles of the planets, and…well, genuine dexterity.
Mandala effect: Kenny Segal’s beats and k’s rhymes swirl on this, colored sand falling into dizzying but calming patterns, pictures, layers, lines, contrasts.
Madeline effect: “He raps like someone just hit him in the head with a brick,” I wrote in 2008 somewhere on the internet, “you have to work for it to find the beauty in the beat. If Cannibal Ox was hip hop’s Miles and Coltrane, k-the-i??? is Charles Mingus. If Edan is Backpacker World’s Eminem, k would be its Biggie”—by which I meant his huge heart, and his opera singer’s basso voice. Then apparently I linked to his Myspace, imagine that. Wow, it’s still there.
The late ’00s had me gorging on all the crazy, wild, out there, spirited and innovative shit that was like a firehose on blogs back then — and Broken Love Letter and Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow have no sell by date, they’re just as unique as when Baby Bush was president. Hearing him spit alongside his direct descendants like Fatboi Sharif and Open Mike Eagle, trade bars with ShrapKnel and Armand Hammer…it’s like he never left, like he’s picking up from 2003’s “Teletron 1” mid-sentence. It’s good to have him back. I been waiting. We need his cacophony and and joyousness, his fractal kaleidoscope lyricism.
BKTHERULA :: LVL5 P2
This joint, as the great Geng says, goes dummy. It tastes like artificial fruit sticky lip gloss and smells like breakfast cereal flavor CBD vape trails. It has pastel lights all over the self-driving future Uber, shakycam tracking shot following us into the club which blurs on the smell, flavor, lights, it’s all a blur, let’s get a cocktail, many cocktails, sweet and sour neon colored cocktails, the beat is thumping and the place is bumping. This record makes me feel high as fuck and I didn’t smoke nothing. I have no idea what’s happening on this record and it lurches around like I never expect. Crazy.
Abstract Museum x Guilty Simpson :: Block Runners
Gully shit, if we still say gully. Do we still say that? Brolic? I’m bringing those back just for this joint. Guilty is so wildly underappreciated and consistently brings it in. Never fails to land a punch. There are no bad Guilty Simpson records, only those with slightly less banging beats — this is one of the joints with the beats that bang you up severely.
DJ Rude One :: Upper Space
2016’s The ONEderful was one of those great producer-led compilations, hand-picking the best MCs in the year’s pulse and genomically tailoring the beats to match. Eight years later, the beats are grimier and dustier, and brings down Stove God, Siifu, Roc Marci, RXKNephew…Rude is illing, the MCs are illing, what more can I say? Top illing.
Illtrumentals
How many times do I have to nag you to listen to more instrumental shit? Y’all go on and on about who’s the best producers, but if there’s no one spitting over it you don’t fuck with it? You need someone to rap you a lullaby, you big baby? We started from the Ultimate Breaks & Beats compilations, Davy D, Mantronix and DJ Mark the 45 King in the ’80s, then turntablist records, then the quantum leap forward to instrumental albums designed to be just that with DJ Krush in 1994 — from there it’s an illustrious 30 year history. Y’all like lo fi beats to chill and study to, these are lo fi beats that chill and you can study. Y’all like Donuts. You like Endtroducing. You like Madlib. So what the hell? DON’T MAKE ME WRITE 7,000 WORDS ABOUT THE INCAS AND REICH’S CLOUDBUSTERS AND MARK ROTHKO OR SOME SHIT, JUST GET WITH IT ALREADY.
The Sound Conspirator :: The First Embers of Cognition / GODISNOWHERE
Sound Conspirator creates in that mentat eyes-rolled-back fugue state. He’s Beatlover Phat. Pink lasers drill into his forehead and the music flows out. Liquid sky tuned to a dead channel. More El-Dritch than El-Producto, Palmer that is. [Rakim voice]: Eat the Chew-Z, I got enough to go around, when the thought takes place on Prox. Occupy Mars, Radio Free Albemuth. No one could rap over this—well, maybe a couple of kids from Neo-Tokyo in 2049: Vordul Megalopolis and Vast Active the Living Intelligence System. The Black Iron Prison, the Iron Galaxy. Fear & Loathing In Heaven & Hell. Wires that itch beneath the skin.
Who, and what, are the agents behind this interpenetration of true and false realities? Why do those agents desire that the artifice of said realities be recognized?
We’re in the camp, the Blue Rider approaches, but he’s not here to save us, he gestures at what’s on the other side of the fence: The Lords of Death, crooked horns swaying on their heads, and the King of Chains, and nearby the train is waiting. God Is Now Here. God Is Nowhere.
small pro :: tn(tp)m(-22) / i had to be a watchmaker in the past /
i had to be a samurai in the past / i had to be a pianist in the past / i had to be a pharoahe in the future past
Some beatmakers are maybe too prolific, tossing out gobs of joints like a Halloween bag of mixed candy. But each of small pro’s albums is carefully assembled and sequenced though, mood pieces chasing their themes and sounds. Small pro’s more prodigious than overproductive — there’s over a hundred tracks across this quintilogy, and you get the impression of a busy, buzzing mind sketching, experimenting, pursuing ideas. There’s on here samples recognizable but also others stretched and flipped to their limits — it’s tachyon tape time. Heavy on choice jazz loops but there’s Philip Glass too, other sounds pushed past post-mortem identification. I feel like he’s working faster and faster, chasing something he can’t quite nail down, going downriver, like a main circuit cable, plugged straight into the ultimate crate, ultimate break, ultimate beat. When he finds that sound, it’s really going to be something else.
odd nosdam :: False Hood / cLOUDDEAD :: cLOUDDEAD (remaster)
There’s a handful of records that the first time I heard, I had just NO IDEA what I was listening to. As in: “is the turntable on the wrong speed? Is it supposed to sound like this? What the fuck is happening?” This would be PE’s “Bring The Noise” 12", Swans’ Greed, and the cLOUDDEAD debut in 2001. Company Flow fractured and reassembled the East Coast rap album, but the West Coast dopplegangers of Doseone, Why? and odd nosdam pioneered a spacier, dadaist, ironic lane that took years for everyone else to catch up on. It sounds as groundbreaking and challenging today as it did then. Of the trio, odd nosdam’s beat work is what I keep up with the most; he’s still crafting wonky but elegant joints that breathe and flow like alluvium.
Somebody — AND THEY KNOW WHO THEY ARE, I AM RAISING MY EYEBROWS IN YOUR DIRECTION — needs to hurry the fuck up and finish a 700 page book on Anticon. There was a deep seam in that scene of innovation and a wild left turn there that isn’t much acknowledged for how far it pushed the envelope so that so many others could come along and lick the flap.
DJ Muggs :: Death Valley OST / Soul Assassins Instrumental Library Vol. 1 & Vol. 2
Yeah, so remember last year when Muggs made that movie to go with his album? Sure you do. The Death Valley OST is the score for it with some good old fashioned Muggs beats and a couple choice loosies from Crimeapple and Meyhem Lauren. And all those years you could only get Muggs’ beats on bootlegs, and now he’s putting them out “inspired by the Kelloggs baseball cards of the 80s”…(uh what? I don’t know, man. It’s like the Sun Ra wine thing.)
This year RZA released a ballet symphony. It’s the worst it could possibly be, 8th grade basic bitch elevator music lite classical. Muggs stays Muggs.
Outside The Box (not the music video channel)
Theo Erskine x Mark Kavuma :: Ultrasound
I listen to a lot of jazz, mostly still catching up on the classics (Archie Shepp, Max Roach, Les McCann and Ken McIntyre were in my bag this year). By chance happened to catch these two doing their thing at a basement club this year, and they blew it out the water. Really superb stuff. Jazz isn’t dead any more than hip hop is dead.
ØKSE :: ØKSE
ØKSE, spelled with an ØKSE, and yo ladies, how I hate to type that goddamn O with a line through it. They like to skronk, they like their jazz funky, they’re sick with this—straight fusion mack. They got Maassai, Cavalier, woods and ELUCID, they say a word that don’t mean nothing, like looptid. The ØKSE dance is the dance, from free jazz’s past to its future, do the ØKS.
TEIP TRIO :: TEIP TRIO II
Super abstract avant-garde Nordic drone jazz? Sign me the fuck up! This is out there. Oh, it’s really out there. You can’t land on Venus using fractions. What are you going to land on, 1/4, 3/8ths? I didn’t know what a sound bath was until I heard this.
9T Antiope :: Horror Vacui
Horror vacui means “fear of the void;” in physics, it’s used to mean “nature abhors a vacuum” — that every void will be filled. (That hasn’t been my experience, but I’m not a scientist.) But also that nothingness can’t be comprehended.
This was the record I ran up the most this year, just because it best got to my mentals. A Bardot Thodol. Grief, hauntings, feeling like a ghost. A dead thing that can’t stop putting one foot in front of the other. A world of burnt ash. One more scar, one more wound, I don’t even feel them anymore.
Anyway, happy holidays everyone!
