Released in 2017 on Ipecac/Deadverse
Format: LPx2 with D-side etching
Overview
After two decades of challenging the system, expanding, and breaking through musical boundaries, New Jersey’s Dälek have distilled their experimental approaches to hip-hop into their most streamlined release yet. Endangered Philosophies honors a lineage of revolutionary martyrs and radical thinkers that have resisted the rigid confines of our bleak, oppressive system. Pounding boom-bap beats underpin layers of distorted washes of sound and old-school turntablism, while MC Dälek declaims his cerebral poetry and insightful political diatribes Finding influence from My Bloody Valentine, industrial music, Sunn O)), and the Bomb Squad, Dälek developed an omnivorous appetite for sampling, emphasizing hypnotic drone, textural ambience and abrasive noise. Sometimes this leads to getting pigeonholed into certain niches of heavy experimental and post-industrial music, but according to MC Dälek: “It’s purely hip-hop, in the purest sense. If you listen to what hip-hop has historically been, it was all about digging in different crates and finding different sounds, and finding different influences to create. […] So, in that sense, what we do is strictly hip-hop.”
Track Notes
A1 – Echoes Of…
(Heavy, Noisy, Dense)
– starts with a heavy loop of distorted guitar noise
– heavy boom bap drums come in, followed by MC Dälek’s first verse while accelerating noises (almost like race cars) join in the dense onslaught of layers
-Beat cuts out for a bar to accent lyrics
-second time beat cuts out, leaving loops of distorted guitars before chorus kicks in
-Chorus – similar to verse musically, but with extra layers of distorted guitars
-buried vocal samples of Fred Hampton before second verse kicks in
-turntable solo after second verse, before last chorus comes in
– first verse is generally about speaking out against the status quo and corruption
– Chorus: “We the echoes of…” influential minds and revolutionary leaders (Malcolm X, MLK, Medgar Evers, Bobby Seale, and Fred Hampton). “Our people won’t kneel!”
-Second Verse
*A2 – Weapons
(ambient, mellow, atmospheric)
A3 – Few Understand
(Focused, Mellow, Droney, Groovy)
-old school turntable stabs during chorus
-ambient bridge
A4 – The Son of Immigrants
-Lyrics reflect on the battle against xenophobia
B1 – Beyond the Madness
– Warm ambient samples & upbeat boom-bap
-relatively uplifting & soothing track
*B2 – Sacrifice
-starts with a great, suspenseful beat
-cinematic & brooding
-hypnotic keyboards
-the flow is monotonous, but lyrics are full of political philosophies and strategies for resistance
*B3 – Nothing Stays Permanent
-dropping more wisdom, unashamedly preaching to the masses, trying to cut through the noise
-militant intellectualism against the sedation of propaganda
-“disrupt continuity”
*B4 – A Collective Cancelled Thought
-washy ambient intro gives way to hypnotic boom-bap meditation
-lyrics reflect the bleakness of our dystopian society, while retaining hope that future generations will be smarter in their resistance
-“Times at their bleakest produce the strongest”
*C1 Battlecries
-slow rock loop, tributes to Coltrane, Ian Curtis and Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka)
-reflects on how the path of music allows for subsistence in “parallel dimensions”. In a rigidly oppressive society, powerful music can provide access this alternative mode of being through its harmonic resonance
C2 – Straight Razors
C3 – Numb
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