(10.26.05) The first release on Hive Records’ new imprint label, Suspicious, Leaf’s Made Into Itself tracks across slumbering hip-hop and dreamy trip-hop as it merges movie samples, caustic MC raps and
dislocated voices into a cinematic road trip. A clear departure from Hive’s more amphetamine-driven power rhythms, Made Into Itself is a moody bit of work that grew on me as I let it run as background music for a few days. Most of the fifteen tracks run in the less than three minute range (just right in some cases, too short in others), and they hang in my head as mood music, tiny soundtracks that engender moods of melancholic retrospection and internalized wool-gathering. While Leaf (Steve Wick in the part of wizard behind the production deck) will occasionally mar a mood with a lengthy movie sample (most have a tendency to run overlong), it is the instrumental shuffle, the grime and glitz of the urban hip-hop, that keeps me nodding.
There is a crackle of lo-fi noise in “Prism,” a whisper of old vinyl beneath the harp and clavier intro and the distant whale song that submerges the listener into a deep morphic spiral. A downtempo siren credited as “Amanda” on the liner notes slinks in as the beats grow to a climax, pulling us out the other side of the ocean dive with her seductive voice. The music of “Lounge Dwellers” is strictly background music for the spoken word piece that categorizes the death of action and activity in the modern generation (“All your base belongs to us, lazy commerce whores!” as it were), while “Paperdress” glitters and grumbles with its winsome chimes and its hard beats, spooking with its rhythms while a solitary cello sings an aria for the nocturnal wanderer.
“Glitch Exercise” molds trip-hop to the particulated effects of microglitch, spinning deep drums and hand claps to the skittering sound of sand across a microphone and static sizzling through an input line. A synth melody glides like a stop-motion sunrise over the bedrock of the rhythms and the whole track lives and dies in three minutes. Boil an egg, check your mail, water the plants: the “Glitch Exercise” will keep you company for that finite slice of your day. “Sevenhundredeightytwo Ways To Wake Up” shivers with left-over glitch, detritus that has slipped across the divide and is still crackling in your speakers. Meanwhile tiny tones rise like streaks of light behind the adagio ramble of a piano. In the end, after three minutes of
being massaged by this day-breaking concerto, a spoken word piece slips into your receptive brain. “Know you,” the voice concludes, “and search for nothing less than absolute truth.” As an aphorism to start your day, you could do a lot worse.
There’s a lot to like on Made Into Itself. Wick has put down a diverse collection of mood music that definitely has flavors of Anticon, Massive Attack and DJ Krush. As accompaniment for nocturnal wool-gathering, solitary wandering or quiet intimacy, Made Into Itself is a welcome soundtrack. A very nice new direction for Hive Records and hopefully the opening standard for more to come.
Made Into Itself is out now on Suspicious, a division of Hive Records.
- Suspicious
- Leaf
