I must confess – I mostly gave up on hip-hop when the gangsters moved in in the early 90s. Things haven’t got much better for me as that scene all descended into bling. I know there have been more abstract strands breaking away from the mainstream since then, but I’ve been too busy elsewhere musically to keep track. So I’m coming at FV as a definite outsider. But, then again, I think FV is probably coming at it as a bit of an outsider himself.
There’s minimal information floating around and the mystery suits the sounds. FV makes instrumental hip-hop which is not scared of frayed edges. Mostly, his productions revolve around stuttering rhythms and light synth or hiss washes, which are rendered rhythmic by virtue of heavy amounts of compression in post-production. There’s the odd spattering of familiar samples – a Miles Davis blast here, some Hitchcock film laughter there – which are subsumed in a dark, grainy, downtempo woosh of sound. A lot of times the titles are, to some degree, descriptive, the aforementioned ‘One For Hitchcock’ or ‘Spaceships Over LA’ giving some idea to the sound sources, or the type of synth sounds which whine away over the broken beats. But it’s never as one dimensional as that sounds. There’s a consistency to the structure and timbre which is coloured by those references, but which makes for a unified listening experience.
This is hip-hop which utilises hip-hop’s traditional sense of exploration and appropriation of a wide range of styles, not just its own established formulas. FV has obviously listened to a lot of dark, experimental and ambient work and this comes through in his own tracks. His slow, stuttering rhythms keep you on your toes rather than have you nod along aimlessly. I’m certainly enjoying them far more than anything I’ve heard that could be classified as hip-hop in a long time.
As far as I can tell, the EP is only available as a free download via FV’s Myspace site (www.myspace.com/efvee) and there’s a bunch of other EPs up there as well, containing the same level of consistency. Well worth tracking down.
Adrian Elmer
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