There seems to be something about instrumental hiphop producers which gives them the leeway to continue hiphop’s original impetus of exploratory production. While obviously a grand oversimplification, it seems much hiphop production is so subservient to the MC-ing as to render it almost redundant. But, out from under those shadows, producers like Blockhead demonstrate that there is still interest to be had from listening to just the music.
It’s possibly debatable whether the music Tony Simon is making in his Blockhead guise can actually be classified as hiphop anymore. I listened to The Music Scene back to back with Bibio’s The Apple And The Tooth on a recent extended roadtrip. Take away Bibio’s vocals and most of his guitar and the two releases are not a million miles from each other in production terms. Certainly Blockhead’s utilisation of consistently biting head nodding beats (not to mention the heritage of his label, Ninja Tune) has him placed further towards the hiphop end of the spectrum but a similar overall æsthetic is certainly at play. What is most notable about The Music Scene is the way in which individual tracks do not rest on single breakbeats but rather move through moods as the samples themselves evolve and mutate. Simon puts this down to working in the Ableton Live context, where wildly disparate elements can be easily and intuitively juxtaposed. It’s not that far removed from what classic hiphop producers from Grandmaster Flash to The Bomb Squad and Prince Paul once did, but it’s nice that a piece of new technology has thrown open the possibilities once again. So ‘Only Sequences Change’ can start with a fairly standard funk break and some light brass hooks then morph over four and a half minutes into a jump-up backbeat with wailing divas and insistent bass urges. ‘Tricky Turtle’ can start out on the streets of 1970s San Francisco and move on to Bobby McFerrin trapped in some Kabul opium den. There’s even space to break from 4/4 as ‘Four Walls’ moves on a dark 6/8 pulse with haunted vocoder vocal and some wailing jazz blues samples.
Putting everything together, there’s actually quite a lot this music has in common with the kind of thing Howie B was doing a decade ago. However, it certainly doesn’t sound dated. The age of much of the sampled material and the wild juxtapositions that can happen between seemingly incongruous elements gives the music a certain degree of timelessness. Hiphop it may be, but in keeping with grand Ninja Tune traditions, it’s listening hiphop, not the paint-by-numbers party variety.
Adrian Elmer
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