ALBUM-BY-ALBUM GUIDE: Dälek

Who's the most visionary hip hop group ever? I don't know. But I know who gets my vote! A guide to the Dälek catalog on Bandcamp, with analysis from frontman Will Brooks.

My complete album-by-album guide to Dälek is now up on Bandcamp’s site. You can stream all their Bandcamp-available titles on the same page.

Complete interview audio coming soon(ish) as well…

Dälek, left to right: Will Brooks, Mike Manteca (photo by Harry Huncken)

I don’t ever feel comfortable saying things like “This artist is the greatest _____ of all time.” I haven’t heard all the music in any given category, not to mention that ranking musicians doesn’t make sense to me. I mean, is there really one greatest-ever at anything?

I’ll say this, though: there’s no one else out there like Dälek.

I mean, just listen to this:

or this:

That first song, to me, sounds eerie and dread-inducing in the best possible way. There’s another song (“Permanent Underclass”) from that same album with a sonic backdrop that makes me think of all the anguished, wailing souls of the people devoured by the gears of capitalism. And the second clip, which came several years later, has a totally different vibe: When I reviewed that later album for Pitchfork, I described it as “hip-hop as a remnant of a civilization long expired several light years away” and “layers of sounds atomized into overlapping clouds of fine mist” that reminded me somehow of the wiring of all human consciousness into a unified field. I said that the album marked hip hop’s “ascension into the noosphere.”

Indeed, over a truly remarkable career, Dälek have blazed their own trail to say the least. As I write in my new piece, the Newark-based outfit’s sound “straddles alternative hip-hop, noise, industrial, shoegaze, krautrock, jazz, and the avant-garde—effectively paving the way for the likes of Death Grips, clipping. and Ho99o9. Equally comfortable appearing on rap bills as they are gracing jazz festivals and sharing stages with metal bands, Dälek’s approach owes as much to groups like Faust, Einstürzende Neubauten, Throbbing Gristle, and Godflesh as it does to first-wave hip-hop giants like Public Enemy, Eric B. & Rakim, and Ultramagnetic MCs.”

I saw Dälek live in 2016 when I was visiting family in New York City. It was funny because I only found out about the show after making the trek from Midtown all the way back up to the North Bronx. I’d gotten completely comfortable and ready for a night of kicking my feet up watching sports when I saw on Facebook that they were playing that same night. I’m fairly certain my Pitchfork review had just run or was just about to run, because I was excited by the timing. I debated staying in because I was not in the mood to head back out, but something told me I couldn’t miss that show. Boy was I glad I went.

At the time, the band was operating as a three-piece — Will Brooks (MC dälek) on the mic, Mike Manteca on programming and Rudy Chicata (DJ rEk) on turntables. Brooks did his share of programming and effects-manipulation too, and what really knocked me out was just how much all three of them were playing off each other. It was apparent to me that they were sculpting the sound in real time quite a bit. All three of them were so flexible, and the interplay between them didn’t seem all that different to me than what you’d see from a jazz trio.

I made the mistake of getting a bite to eat after the show, lingering in Lower Manhattan after the cutoff point where the subway service gets agonizingly slow, so it took me something like two hours to get back to my brother’s place. Totally worth it, though. I wrote this feature story for Bandcamp shortly after that show, and when they asked me to do this guide I was like “Hell yes.” This time, I spoke with Will for something like three hours, discussing pretty much every release in the band’s catalog, including the titles that aren’t up on Bandcamp. Stay tuned!

This kinda gets across the vibe at the show I was at, but you don’t get a good view of what everyone’s doing onstage:

And this isn’t the greatest capture of the lineup I saw, but this clip shows how refined of a touch Rudy Chicata has:

Seriously, check out their stuff via my new piece, where most of it’s collected in one place for ease of access. Enjoy!

<3 SRK