| The eighty-five minute DVD includes performances from cLOUDDEAD, Reaching Quiet, Boom Bip & Doseone, Radioinactive, and Labtekwon taped at shows held at Los Angeles' El Rey and San Francisco's Great American Music Hall. With its casual, handheld camerawork heavy on quick cuts and goofy juxtapositions, Mush captures the mundane surreality common to nationwide tours. What makes the DVD noteworthy is that Mush Records - along with Anticon - has forged one of hip-hop's few new approaches over the last five years. With the exception of Labtekwon's standard flows, nut-grabbin', and sports-paraphernalia-wearing, the musicians here flout or just ignore the genre's live conventions. In fact, Reaching Quiet aren't hip-hop at all, but rather a lo-fi prog-rock band with rudimentary technique and wack melodies. They come off as the brainchild of Drag City comedian Neil Hamburger. By contrast, cLOUDDEAD (why?, Doseone, and odd nosdam) invest hip-hop with unprecedented psychedelic atmospheres and textures (Dose and why? ruffle through money for percussion on one track) while mutating language into acid-laced dream logic, replacing rap's usual bravado with uncertainty, confusion, and angst. They wear cool masks, too, and Dose (arguably the star of the whole crew) rocks a porkpie hat, dollar-sign silver chain, and white fur coat. Boom Bip & Doseone blaze similarly out-there trails on Mush Tour Spring 2002, molding psych-rock and avant-jazz's daring instrumentation to their advanced hip-hop structures. Radioinactive's group nearly steal the DVD with their bizarre papier-mché foliage shawls and headdresses while executing Middle Eastern and jazz-inflected hip-hop featuring Radio's speed-freak raps. It may be weirdness for its own sake, but it's fascinating, hilarious weirdness. And those adjectives apply to the DVD and Mush's output in general. This next level's befuddlingly askew. - The Stranger |
DVD/Out Of Print