Als Einschub möchte ich einen Artikel aus der Chicagoer Sun-Times posten, der hier ganz gut hinpasst:
Sun-Times
Dalek makes hip-hop without sound barriers
[Chicago Sun-Times, Mar 2, 2007 by David Jakubiak]For more than a decade New Jersey’s Dalek, the duo of producer and MC dalek and co-producer Oktopus, has been creating a hip-hop sound so heavy, so filled with droning distortion, so far from the glitz of the mainstream sound of the genre that people have struggled to identify it.
So they’ve given it other names: trip-hop, glitch-hop, metal- shoegaze-hip-hop.
The duo’s lead producer, and MC, dalek, laughs at these classifications.
„It’s purely hip-hop, in the purest sense,“ he says. „If you listen to what hip-hop has historically been, it was all about digging in different crates and finding different sounds, and finding different influences to create. If Afrika Bambaataa wasn’t influenced by Kraftwerk, we wouldn’t have ‚Planet Rock.‘ So, in that sense, what we do is strictly hip-hop.“
If there is a difference, he adds, „It’s that the palette of sounds we work with is more varied than what has been called hip- hop in the last 10 years. Somehow, as hip-hop grew, it’s been put into this box. I think it’s funny when people are like, ‚That’s not hip-hop. It’s this and this and this.‘ You can try to rationalize it as whatever you want to rationalize it as.“
On Tuesday, Dalek, whose name came from an intentional misspelling of „dialect,“ not the evildoers from the BBC’s „Doctor Who,“ released „Abandoned Language.“ It is their third CD for Ipecac Recordings, and the follow-up to 2004’s „Absence,“ and it continues that project’s delivery of a dark cacophony that would make pop rappers shiver.
But this time, dalek explains, the instrumentation used to achieve this sound was changed.
„The guitar wall of sound was ‚Absence.‘ [This time] we used almost more subdued instruments — Fender Rhodes [electric piano], a lot of brass, a lot of live strings. They were really unobtrusive instruments that we had to work on layering to make a new wall of sound.“
Accomplishing that sound is a truly collaborative effort.
„I work on beats all the time and Oktopus does the same,“ dalek says, „and we’ll get together every couple of weeks and decide which ones fit together.“
But they also go into the process thinking of their songs as songs rather than beats that will eventually be dressed up with lyrics.
„What you have in hip-hop is MCs who are just MCs and producers who are just producers. So you have kids coming to the studio who don’t even care what goes into making a song,“ dalek says. „A song is more than just spitting rhymes over a beat; the music and the words need to do something together. Because I’m the MC and I co- produce with Oktopus, I can say things lyrically and then say other things with the music. They work together.“
In writing songs, dalek says, he looks internally.
„I don’t stick my head out the window and try to figure out what will make people happy; I try to express myself through my art and my music. If I was trying to please people, I’d be a politician.“
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Hey man, why don't we make a tune... just playin' the melody, not play the solos...