If the massive resurgence of fuzzy, static-laden, shoegaze-y music in the past five years is any indication, music fans love noise. But Nick Millevoi, a key figure in several projects before this, isn’t reminiscent of My Bloody Valentine in the slightest. Instead, his frenetic twelve-string compositions owe much more to the No Wave scene of ‘70s/80s New York, a flash-in-the-pan group of musicians who used noise, minimal structure, and sometimes utter intimidation as their claim to notoriety. The noisiness found on Millevoi’s Black Figure of a Bird offers virtually nothing in terms of the warmth, delicacy, or etherealness that’s expected from today’s shoegaze trend-followers. In fact, the title of the last track, “Nothing Forms a Liquid”, might be a perfect descriptor of what’s going on here. Millevoi’s lone guitar is all treble, a chiming, brittle tonality that maps out into a dozen angles at once. His compositions are fiercely bare-bones, but with an undeniable life-blood churning somewhere at their core.
“Warm Green Disks” shows something of Millevoi’s jazz leanings, as well as a serious King Crimson vibe (Larks’ Tongues in Aspic era), in its constant, spidery movement up and down his freakishly-tuned scales, before building into a fuller, more atonal onslaught. This structure becomes a pattern, consistently finding new variations over the course of the record’s brief tracklist. “Life in Ice” offers a similar chordal fury interspersed with noise-making that gives you, quite chillingly, the effect of ice cracking and splintering off beneath your feet. “What Sunlight Does Make It Through” is about as gentle as the record gets, with spacey swaths that grow increasingly more tense and effects-laden. “Bruxer” is like a Greg Ginn solo pushed to its limit and looped for a minute and a half, and “Nothing Forms a Liquid” experiments with excessively-overdriven pinch harmonics.
Black Figure of a Bird isn’t for everyone; it really only caters to that specific set of listeners who enjoy atonal guitar experiments. But those who feel themselves a part of that category will undoubtedly find these tunes both visceral and fascinating.
Lushlife, a.k.a. Raj Haldar, has been dropping mixtapes since 2005, when he released his debut entitled West Sounds, which was a mashup of The Beach Boy’s classic Pet Sounds and Kanye West’s College Dropout and Late Registration as well as his own verses. On his first label release Plateau Vision (Western Vinyl), Lush continues to develop his eclectic style, combining ‘60s psychedelic, experimental indie and golden era hip hop sounds to create the grandiose, maximalist soundscape beats that he rhymes over.
With his latest LP, Lush establishes himself as a unique artist who is able to take influences from various genres, sounds and eras of music to develop a completely original style that has one foot in classic hip hop and the other through the doorway of the future. This distinctive style is displayed immediately on the album’s opener “Magnolia.” The track combines a beautiful harp sample over a hard boom bap beat with lyrics that reference composer Burt Bacharach, the graffiti culture of Wild Style, Citizen Kane’s Xanadu and Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock” through his gritty Nas-esque vocal delivery. In “Hale-Bopp was the Bedouins,” which features Das Racists’ Heems, Haldar references his technique as “half-Delorean, half-rap historian.”
Plateau Vision boasts an impressive guest list of artists including Andrew Cedermark (Titus Andronicus), Styles P and Shad amongst others, but Lushlife always shines through as both an emcee and a producer. The first feature comes from Styles P (famous for his work with ‘90s hip hop crew LOX) on “Still Hear The Word Progress,” one of the LP’s standout tracks. Lushlife trades bars back and forth with the iconic emcee at a furious pace without losing a step over a dense synth and 8-bit beat. Towards the halfway point of the album, Lush shines brightly with fellow Philly emcee and former Atlanta native STS on “Glistening,” and he hands over the mic on “Gymnopedie 1.2” to critically acclaimed Canadian emcee Shad while crafting one of the most interesting beats on the Plateau Vision by sampling one of 20th century French composer/pianist Erik Satie’s “Gymnopedies,” which fades out under a clip from Busy Bee and Kool Moe Dee’s classic emcee battle, tying Haldar’s classical and jazz upbringing with his “fetish” for golden era hip hop culture.
Lushlife is definitely one of the most interesting artists in hip hop today. He continues to push the genre’s boundaries with his production while remaining true to its culture through his vocal delivery and preservation of its history throughout his lyrics. Plateau Vision is available for streaming HERE, and you can purchase the album via Western Vinyl. - Dan Brightcliffe
