(06.22.06) Keef Baker joins Ad Noiseam for a flirtatiously short thirty-minute EP entitled Pure Language. Six tracks of splendid crunchy beatwork find Baker mixing jazz, ambience, male and female vocals and orchestral goodness into deeply head-nodding frameworks. He’s out to confound everyone, to put his past behind him, and let us know that the genres are his for the taking.
“Straw Overcoat” is born from a clatter of tin cans, an urban rhythm that morphs into a textured breakbeat. A bridge of solar ambience shears through the middle and is blown away by a heady paroxysm of bass and beats, a rolling thunder that is like Olympic deities responding to the tiny can clatter of the opening. It’s massive soundtrack-style stuff and is a fantastic opening salvo in the “Keef Baker takes over the world” paradigm. “Psychiatric Credit” saunters in on a flute melody like a valet with a cool drink and a hot towel.
You’re settled in a sunken leather chair in some retro 60s kitsch lounge, sipping something vaguely tiki-flavored, while a one-man jazz band recreates the swinging hipster sounds of the era. It’s a head-turning jazz nod that attaches itself to the “retro is nouveau” vibe, and two-thirds of the way through the song, Baker turns its into a rolling drum ‘n’ bass orgy, complete with space organ and noise-inflected beats. It’s the industrial war machine gone vaporous lounge lizard — the sort of soundtrack you’d catch at the Restaurant At The End of the Universe.
Baker, taking a page from the Breakbeat Era and Kosheen playbook, brings in vocals for “Chance” and “Certainty.” While the voice is simply utilized as another texture in “Chance” (she essentially repeats the same lyric over and over again), “Certainty” plays out as a spoken word torch song welded to the back of a breakbeat smackdown. Baker takes a stripped down setup (drum set, upright bass, singer) and
drenches them with layers of drum programming and synth waves, transforming a tiny show in a smoky club into a performance hall extravaganza. “The Middle” shyly blossoms from a piano and acoustic guitar duet into a crackling dark hop piece, loops of beats rising beneath the delicate melody; while “The End” churns and gasps with noise as Baker builds up to a stormy finish, a swirling pop chorus that breaks over the listener like a massive wave.
Pure Language has been on high rotation this last week around HQ. Baker’s intricate command of diverse instrumentation and beat programming is continually fascinating. He weaves together disparate strands into a collection of tracks that are both retro and futuristic, boldly meshing the nostalgia of jazz lounges with the whiz-bang complexity of breakbeat futurism. Pure Language holds to no regional dialect; it breaks open the past in order to inform the future. Highly recommended.
Pure Language is out now on Ad Noiseam. (Buy it at Amazon.com)
