There is this one kind of horrible image that haunts me pretty regularly where a skeleton comes back to life. It's a slow, gruesome process, these inert bones laying in a crypt while some evil force knits together muscle and tendon, veins creep along once dead limbs and fingers twitch with malice until it finally rises, a raging ghoul with newly coursing blood driving it to kill. In the nightmare version, I am of course transfixed, standing (for some unknown reason) at the foot of the tomb while the creature comes to life, too scared or stupid to run away. In the daydream version it is this weird science project, like those high-speed nature films of sunsets and flowers blooming. In my thoughts it becomes a metaphor for this one kind of minimal music that I am drawn too.
I mean like Mobb Deep "Shook Ones Part II", where the blaring, siren-like horns play out on their own with just a hi-hat/snare crack behind them before that muttering starts; where the menacing voices and horns fully mesh up before the creeping, ominous chords join in; where even two minutes into the song it feels like some sounds are still missing. Where the chorus, finally bringing all the sounds together, feels like a storm, feels like drowning and being shook and lost in the dark and thunder all at once.
I mean like every single cut on the Pantha du Prince record, the one I really can't stop listening to. Where these almost off-kilter loops tangle and mash each other: bells ring [arteries stretch out]; hoofbeat bass clips [sinews twist and wrap around bone], mournful, distant piano notes chime [eyelids blink over empty sockets]; blown-out yet muted alien static hisses [blood starts to fill the once-empty ribcage, first breath gasped]. Each song takes you to such dark new places but with a deftness that surprises every time.
But I also mean like Squarepusher's "Journey to Reedham", which is like the Disney cartoon version of the skeleton-come-to-life vision. The steady layering and re-layering of sound, starting from tiny, bouncing, neon-lit melodies to full-on, cartwheeling breathless fun, complete with blurry bass drum rolls and a completely life-affirming melody. Again, it's one of those songs that seems to travel a million miles from beginning to end, but if you listen carefully, you'll hear that every individual sound that barely held together the opening of the song - those snare notes that sounded once every other measure, the three root notes of the opening melody, the almost sub-sonic bass tone that grounded the song - they're still there. The bones all present, just hidden under the surface.
In April of this year Black Shadow issued a handful of 45s with a new riddim, Bad Dog. Produced by Troyton Rami (um, dude behind Sean Paul's "Give Me the Light"), the beat is absolutely one of the best things that's happened so far this year in music, period. While I'm certainly not the first person to write about it, there hasn't yet been the storm of excitement that the riddim deserves.
This skeleton-come-to-life scenario is midway between the scary version and the kiddie one. The song begins with a minimal snare beat and a flat, whistling, four-note tune. I don't know what that sound is sourced from, but it reminds me of those long, corregated plastic tubes that you whirl around to make a high pitched tone, but chopped up into little pieces. After a few measures, a second tone appears, but that melody just follows the first one, right on top of it. It's one of those moves that could either be amateur or beyond genius, either way I'd give him credit, but for sure Rami knows what he's doing. For the rest of the cut he continues to add layers to the same melody, each one making a little bit more use of delay to fill out the sound. Subtle rattles appear and vanish like phantoms, clipped gurgles and sped-up dub effects sound just often enough to prevent the riddim from feeling hypnotic or repetitive. On the one hand it's horribly desolate, an ill-ease soundtrack for a slow, grey-skied landscape. But the lightness of the root melody skips along with an eager, c'mon-let's-have-fun energy that's completely unavoidable. Before I can ever make up my mind which one it is, the side's over.
By my count there are eight different versions floating around of the cut, but none of them are as compelling as the beat on its own. Elephant Man's try ("Down Ah Prison") is maybe the most interesting, because he rides the beat so completely it's like his voice is another layer on the whistle melody, but at the same time it's kind of the most annoying, his heavy cough of a voice gumming up the ghostlike whisper of the song. Beenie Man's trilling bombast ("The Crime") is kind of charming, as is Movado's melodic croon ("Don't Mess Around"), but for the most part every version just sounds like the vocals were lifted off any similar-paced riddim, without any connection to the beat. Rekha's Jamaican take on Kelly Rowland ("No guts") is generally my favorite singing style in the world, but I'd still prefer the beat on its own.
The timing is a little bit blurry to me but I like the idea that this riddim first hit right around the same time as all the Basic Channel stuff got reissued, right around the same time that the Pantha du Prince and the Field CDs came out and everyone started thinking about minimal techno again. It would definitely be an amazing historical moment if everyone just started thinking about minimal music again, and the "Bad Dog" riddim was at the front of the pack.
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