(Warp)
Joining the dots between rave and contemporary hip-hop, the Scottish producer’s feverish third solo album hovers on the edge of chaos
If you believe the accompanying press release, Glasgow-born, LA-based Ross Birchard has spent the six years since his last album as Hudson Mohawke engaged in variety of intriguing activities. The sometime Kanye West and Drake producer has variously set up barbecues outside clubs, ready to feed bleary-eyed ravers at 7am; running “Bob Ross-style” art classes for his fellow electronic auteurs and conducting a 12-step programme designed to rid people of irony. The reality seems to be that he’s spent recent years thinking about his past. In 2020, he put out three mixtapes of previously unreleased archive material, some of it dating back to the mid-00s. His new album, meanwhile, harks back even further, to the kind of bouncy happy hardcore popular in Scotland when he was a kid, which presumably trickled into his life via radio and rave tape packs.
In truth, it’s an influence that Birchard has never really got away from. He’s periodically resurrected his teenage DJ persona Mayhem and sampled happy hardcore producer Darren Styles on Shadows, from his 2015 album Lantern. That track also featured a writing credit for another hardcore legend, Gammer, with whom Birchard has regularly collaborated. Under the circumstances, it’s hard not to hope that he spent at least some of his time in the court of Kanye West trying to interest Ye in the oeuvres of Hixxy and Dougal.
Continue reading...by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian
No comments:
Post a Comment