24th February 12
DOWNLOAD: Dean Blunt – The Narcissist II
Posted in Reviews, Uncategorized
You can’t second guess Hype Williams. That much has been clear since their inception. From tapes filled with 20 minutes of bass and strangled noise with titles like ‘Jeff Atkins #7’, to jam-session jiggery-pokery on their debut album, which was followed by strange twisted explorations of the ‘nuum on the Hippos in Tanks label (which won them much accord), their music has been highly varied and yet often easily identifiable as their own – when compared to other musicians whose works often turn unpleasantly muddy when working with too many elements. They don’t follow a typical release convention either; their discography is a sprawl of highly limited releases, sketches and oddities. Tracks from one piece often bleed onto another, sizeable chunks of music are sampled or half-inched. The listener is constantly being pulled this way and that, but that’s the fun of it. There’s a sense of legitimate mystery to the outfit, but one built up around misdirection and slight of hand. Ask a question in an interview and you’ll as likely get a sincere answer as a witty aside.
The Narcissist II is billed as being the solo work of Dean Blunt, one half of the Hype Williams duo, and he curates a certain sense of identity that’s already been suggested in a previous few experiments. His first release Jil Scott Herring OST, a 100-copy release on The Trilogy Tapes was a 15 minute excursion into the odd. Small refrains of guitar and birdsong spun around the monotonous tolling of bells and machine-gunfire split down the middle by a woman crying boisterously. A thin gossamer of darkness hung over the whole thing, a contrast to his band mate Inga Copeland’s solo pop tinged release on Rush Hour just before. The Narcissist II, thrown without much ado onto soundcloud, seems to expand upon this, creating something strikingly melancholy.
Much of the first two thirds of the 30 minute piece are spun out of music released around the New Year as a highly limited release and the first under the Narcissist title. No. 2 seems a revision, cutting a few tracks out, reshuffling and adding some low-key field recordings and snippets of dialog. The subtle changes have resulted in the music taking on an almost cinematic feel; it seemed apt that the previous work was titled as an Original Soundtrack in the way it built tangible feeling with sound collage, Narcissist II seems to carry that forward into a more musical setting.
The first five minutes seem designed as both something of an endurance test and overt mood dampener, just to get you into the swing of things. Droning synths are slowly warped and twisted unbearably, eventually decaying Disintegration Loops style into the sounds of a rolling thunderstorm. Rain and white noise bounce off tarmac and distant buildings as the music segues into slow, gloopy organs and Blunts vocals, something not previously heard in any Hype Williams production to date. It’s seems surprising after first listen how it’s not been a feature of his music before. It slots naturally into place, spinning lazy love songs (for these are definitively songs) over the music. There’s a certain kind of Radio 2 spin on them too, a cracked and slightly beige sense of time and place that particular strain of music provides. Blunt has mentioned in several interviews the effect of Steely Dan and other music played by his parents had on him growing up and he seems to be channelling that here. Pop and R&B has often been a point Hype Williams have touched upon and this seems to be Blunt’s personal exploration of that, providing an angle different from that of Inga Copeland.
The further the music plays down the soundcloud wavelength the more those distant buildings come into focus too, there’s a rooted feeling of the city to be found here .The field recordings slipped in between acts conjuring images of fireworks exploding damply in light pollution-bleached skies and sirens rebounding off the angles of a street. It’s intense and dramatic, the interlude at 22:30 with a cut of an argument swirling around with those sirens as clouds blacken and thunder, before sliding into a stunningly slow and moody duet with a dreamy sounding Copeland. You can feel the camera lens pulling back from the scene to take in the city (the video chosen for the track carries the analogy and the tone perfectly). It’s possibly one of the most forward releases from artist(s) more usually known for playing their cards close to their chest.
That this release is surprising should by now be unsurprising, Hype Williams as an umbrella project have an uncanny knack for this stuff. Their debut on Hyperdub was quickly followed by the splitting apart and subsequent solo efforts (though the question remains just how solo they are) rather than capitalisation. Their large discography contains several releases thrown onto filesharing sites, and they have a habit of flitting from label to label. The nearest comparison to be drawn is that of Wiley, not a name picked idly out of a hat with several tracks of their previous album One Nation featuring titles pulled from his work. Yet whilst Wiley’s unpredictability is an almost unconscious part of who he is, it seems Hype Williams are more calculated than that; using it as a kind of shrouded statement. Blunt often mentions his disinterest in taking any kind of straight and narrow path musicians often follow. His interview with Sonic Router contributor Rory Gibb last year teased out something particularly interesting; Dean referred to his work as a process, on-going and something that ‘shouldn’t be judged by one record, or even the seven or so we’ve released so far’.
Of course the chances are it’s just another thread on a tapestry of white lies, but half the fun is pulling at them. That The Narcissist II feels a little more forward than previous work (I’m looking at you Pokémon chop’n’screw) doesn’t mean any more questions are answered, if anything it asks more. It’s an excellent 30 minutes to sink into though, moody and refreshing. It suggests more than a few directions the future music could take, though it’d probably be futile to gauge just what they might be.
Words: Matthew Kent // Out: Now via Mediafire
