 |
Sixtoo - Chewing on Glass and Other Miracle Cures This is not a hip-hop record. Chewing on Glass takes all our preconceptions of underground hip-hop and shatters them to smithereens with this intensely personal framework of complex instrumental sounds. It moves effortlessly from Miles Davis-like jazz stylings to Kraut-rock, taking in breakbeat and trip-hop on the way.
Followers of the Canadian left-field scene, which spawned the likes of Sage Francis and Buck 65, will be familiar with Sixtoo and his dark, brooding, masterfully sampled sounds. Since dropping his first demo back in 1994, his musical ethic has veered towards the creation of a whole new type of hip-hop sound.
Sixtoo has carefully carved his niche as the master sampler, chopping, manipulating and building electrifyingly sinister soundscapes. Over fifteen turbulent years he has evolved from an average MC into one of hip-hop's most innovative producers. His first album Duration (2000) was hailed as an instrumental hip-hop classic and saw him move decisively away from the mic. The journey continued with the release of Antagonist Survival Kit on the UK based Vertical Forms label. This dark-ass record gave us the best of both Sixtoo's worlds, on the mic for half of it and hitting the SP hard for the rest.
There's no doubting that Sixtoo is taking hip-hop to another level. Ever the faithful B-Boy he remains locked to his sampler and turntables, but his relationship with his two major instruments has gone through more twists and turns than your average EastEnders marriage. In 2003, with Ninja Tune sitting up and taking notice on both sides of the Atlantic, he started work on this record guided by the vague notion of constructing something that sounded like a live band.
This driving need for a new direction has dogged the album's progress. Four months of careful beat construction was scrapped due to a sudden realisation that to make, what would become Chewing on Glass & Other Miracle Cures, he needed to step back from everything he had done before. A gift of an electronic Rhodes Piano from his long-term girlfriend sparked off the idea that this record would not be solely based on mining wax for samples, tracks were built from live sources and on some the organic quality of the live instrumentation dominates all else. You can find out a bit more in our interview with Sixtoo.
As his vision of the album progressed, Sixtoo placed a number of strategic phone calls to friends and acquaintances, everyone from Kraut pysch-rock god Damo Suzuki and Norsola and Thierry from the mysterious Godspeed You Black Emperor, to Eric Craven from The Hanged Up. All of whom can be referenced within the sliced and diced signature Sixtoo sound.
But regardless of the technical quality this album is not an easy listen, it takes you on a messy ride to the sombre side of your conscience. Robot-like rapping rains down on your ears amid a painstakingly manipulated electrical storm as Sixtoo proves his instrumental prowess. The majority of the album features sophisticated rock and jazz blends but opening track Boxcutter Emporium Part 1 is ear-shatteringly original and loaded with his trademark scratches and samples, the nearest comparison I can draw is DJ Shadow on a bad acid trip.
A massive amount of recording space is referenced in 45 minutes. Stand out tracks include Old Days Architecture with its unsettling break beaty feel and dark elegance. Snake Bite is a tight spacious tune that opens with sneaky and slightly sinister percussive rattling sounds and is built up with layers of graceful dark cello and background distortion sounds all highlighting his capabilities as a producer.
Chewing on Glass is essentially a psyche rock/jazz masterpiece made by a long time hip-hop producer. Instrumental hip-hop is one of the most exciting and diverse musical genres to emerge of late and Sixtoo and Ninja Tune are doing a quality job of pushing things forward. I wait with baited breath to see what Sixtoo's next musical miracle will be.
|
