Sunday, September 10th, 2006
Artist: Dabrye
Album: Two/Three
Label: Ghostly International
A hip-hop producer/DJ extraordinaire solo album can be a mixed bag. Often it will only be as good as the guest rappers deliveries, victim to faltered half-hearted and hung-over flow, or poor cellphone reception on a phoned-in cameo. Fortunately, I first heard Dabrye’s Two/Three in instrumental form. Not that guest MC’s such as Kadence, Doom, and Beans don’t deliver the abstracted goods on their tracks, but as instrumentals I could here and appreciate Dabrye for Dabrye, not as friend of some semi-famous rapper dudes.
The beats utilize anachronistic samples that sound as if they were recorded onto a micro-cassette recorder, as they oozed from the cobweb and dust clogged synthesizer speaker in some confederate pawnshop. These are juxtaposed against sublime frequencies from East Asian groove organ solos and gypsy deep-funk bootlegs sold on the black market, spread out next to wind-up critters and Soviet Army watches on a grease-stained and moth-eaten blanket. If Kraftwerk had been a King Tubby influenced hip-hop act from a small town on the Caspian Sea this album might have surfaced some three decades earlier.
LISTEN: Dabrye featuring Kadence – Encoded Flow
[visit Ghostly International for more info]
Filed under: music
