| Producer Boom Bip and vocalist Doseone (also of cLOUDDEAD) are latchkey kids in the house of hip-hop. Listening to Circle, you get the feeling that they are on the outside of the genre looking further out. The cd could be categorized as a hip-hop album, but it's more like a musical recording of dreams, a documentary of what rattles around inside someone's head when he is on the verge of full morning wakefulness but not quite there. Doseone doesn't shoot for freestyle rhymes; he opts instead for singsong stream-of-conscious styling, his subjects ranging from zookeepers to highway directions to his current disordered state of mental affairs. Mirroring this narrative confusion is his delivery itself. His voice mutates within tracks, growing from a quiet, nasal whine to a growling baritone, shifting into howls and conspiratorial whispers. This multiple-personality technique is distantly related to the approach taken by singers like Mike Patton of Faith No More/Mr. Bungle fame and Bruce Merkle from 9353. Boom Bip follows Doseone's lead with an incongruous collection of backing samples and instrumentation. "Slight" begins with a jack-in-the-box plinking melody that bursts into an overdose of guitar and headache percussion - think Butthole Surfers circa Locust Abortion Technician. On the third track, represented by a square symbol, Boom Bip underscores Doseone's Sir Mix-A-Lot-style articulation with children's music. And he brings a soothing, slightly tribal bachelor's-pad sexiness to Doseone's lilting delivery on "'Art Saved My Life' - 71." Both Boom Bip and Doseone are highly active within hip-hop, associating with labels like Anticon and Mush Records. But much of the work they're connected with shares the hypnotic and labyrinthian perplexity found on Circle. - Sonomu |
2XLP/Out Of Print