w/Bobby Karate, Norman
Sun Sept 7, Graceland, 9:30 pm, $8.
Although they don't always publicly coexist in our fractured, genre-splicing world, underground hardcore and hiphop have always had more in common than their respective fan bases display. The most strident strains of both come from a similar animal instinct--a pissed-off posse whose finest output snaps the neck of falsehood and fervently sniffs out new directions in sound. Societal damage becomes lyrical damage as the music bruises the spine of whatever system it takes on. Politically aware artists like Public Enemy and KRS-One have always had a place on punk turntables, but newer brainy hiphop acts continue spiking the rock bunch. Among them, New Jersey's Dälek have managed to break beyond the typical hiphop holding pens--with their label (Mike Patton's Ipecac Recordings), tourmates (Dillinger Escape Plan, Tomahawk, Rye Coalition), and music.
Founded in 1997, Dälek create a dense, murky sound--one congested with dirgy, traffic-heavy noise, ghostly shoegazer atmospherics, and skronky free jazz--set to distorted, drop-kicked beats, fusing the adventurous mechanics and aggression of avant hardcore with PE's hiphop blueprints. Their work (the 1998 debut Negro Necro Nekros and the brilliant From Filthy Tongue of Gods and Griots) pulls references from Faust, the Velvet Underground, Tricky, and My Bloody Valentine as well as from classic hiphop; the technical musical intensity is fueled by resolute delivery from Will Brooks, who uses Dälek as his pseudonym: "Propel my anger past rage/what you thought was phase is the air to my every day.... Your ideas of liberty are archaic/you took freedom and enslaved it/I don't portray the role of revolutionary/Just slice the jugular of society" ("Hold Tight").
"Our music is as angry as my thoughts and it's as dark as the messages I want to get across," says Dälek from his home in Newark. "It disturbs me what's being passed off as [mainstream] hiphop today. It's basically pop music and the music is so happy. I don't understand where hiphop made that turn. It used to be such a dark, angry music. But," he laughs, "I guess if you're making millions of dollars, that would tend to make you very happy."
Sounds a lot like the trajectory of hardcore--abrasive protest music turned easily digestible at the mainstream level, yet fiercer and more interesting than ever in the underground. Dälek--who works with co-producer Oktopus and Still on the turntables--isn't interested in placating anyone. He's firmly embedded in the Ipecac aesthetic, a roster that includes Ruins, Tomahawk, Skeleton Key, and the Melvins, all awesome musical outsiders, the last of which Dälek calls icons. "We did our tour with the Melvins and we hit it off," he says. "There's definitely going to be some work done together [in the future] and if there ever was a band to model a career after, that's definitely the band for me. To play as long as those guys have and always believe in it is pretty friggin' ridiculous. I totally admire them."
Even without the Melvins on board, Dälek still manage to create a leveling amount of effects. Their dynamic is relentless and steely on songs like Filthy's "Classical Homicide," an industrial-grade chemical cleanser of a song with lyrics clawing through warped noise loops. But the song preceding it, "Forever Close My Eyes," is as shimmering and narcotic as a MBV track, with echoing effects that would make the Verve swoon. Although the music is a mix of organic material and samples, Dälek says he strives to structure all his music in his own style. "[Older] hiphop records took sounds off [other] records and changed them to sound nothing like the original, but unfortunately a lot of [new] hiphop records are just old jazz records where huge chunks are looped and a beat is thrown underneath," he says. "I didn't know that growing up, so I think I've always worked a lot harder on the production end. Apparently I was doing it the hard way. But that's kind of developed into our style: We'll manipulate the smallest possible sample in such a way that I'm composing a completely new piece of music. It definitely runs through the music we create, which comes out as a very dense, dark sound."