| Radioinactive trusts in Sun Ra, but remembers to tie his camel to a post. Kamal Humphrey de Iruretagoyena dreams in cosmic fantasy - The "Pyramidi" cover depicts a proud boy-cosmonaut on foreign planetary soil - but he still knows that this is hip-hop, even if this new nerd-uprising of Anticon-spearheaded avant-garde hip-hop-ism allows a rapper to tell familiar tales of ballin' and sneakers and ladies and brand-names and fat-man-skills in abstracted streams of poetic non-rhymes buried deep in the dusty grooves gathered on the cheapest equipment. Radioinactive flaunts fetishes for suspiciously strange record-store detritus, but gets most aroused by the scratchy sounds of seventy's sci-fi soundtracks, Arabic instrumental flourish and Sun Ra (so many sly references). And, in true hip-hop style, these wanton wonts come through in the jumbled collagist whole of collated-source sound assemblage. Sampler-baby Radio makes fine use of his sampler, baby, and he's ably helped by Antimc, Omid, and Alias, the whole thrown together in a too-close set that sprawls over a lost-and-wandering thirty tracks and seventy minutes, some songs vivid short episodes, some silly asides. The whole, thrown together, can make your head spin - the interlude "Impulsive" is straight scary - and the intoxicating impressionist giddiness impelled unto listeners influences how it is listened to, too. The record comes across as absorbing and absurd and abstruse as a deep-night dream that you recall, on waking, in great detail. - Neu Music |
2XLP/Out Of Print