KID 606 vs. DÄLEK

Ruin it

12”/CDEP, tigerbeat6

It was just a matter of time until something like this happened and I guess it will happen again. The crossing of the most progressive electronica and underground hip hop has born an offspring that is usually called Abstract Hip Hop and both Kid 606 and Dälek are on the forefront of their respective styles. And bringing them together was both inevitable and genius. These thanks go out to Justin Broadrick and Kevin Martin, who introduced Kid 606 to Dälek, so I guess this happened when Dälek toured with Techno Animal two years ago. By the way, as I remember now, Techno Animal also enriched their very own version of electronic music with some out of the way-style rapping on their latest album “brotherhood of the bomb” and this one was completely forgotten in the essay on Abstract Hip Hop, even though it was well worth to be mentioned, so there you go. Things never are as new as you think they might be, especially not when talking about music. If you dig a little deeper you might come up with a Sun Ra-record that sounds a lot like electronica mixed with rapping, even though both styles didn’t exist, when it was recorded. Which is nothing unusual with Sun Ra, by the way.

The music on ruin it nevertheless has an impeccable freshness and newness to it. At first you get a Dälek remix of the title track and that is no hint at what is ahead for the listener. It’s a dark and brooding rap-spoken word-piece with beats and atmosphere, as done by Dälek, maybe with more breaks and cutups. Then you’ll get a track called “revenge of the circuit burners” which gives the term downbeat a whole new meaning, because I guess you won’t have heard so heavy 4/4-bass-beats in connection with rapping yet. Next up is the original version of the title track “ruin it, ruin them, ruin yourself, then ruin me” which gives you the genius of Kid 606 – producing epic beauty out of scrap and dirt all the while building up sparse and unconnected sounds into a big spheric collage of harmonies. Around these three tracks the whole thing revolves.

Next on the list is capitalist true-cost-calculation, because on the CD-version you get two more tracks (don’t be too happy yet) for a cheaper price than the vinyl version. Yes, it is true, it is cheaper to produce a CD than a 12”-record. Way cheaper and cheaper postage, too, due to weight and I don’t think the artwork is so much more special, really. Think about it. Anyway, “Vague recollection” is a spheric noise-drone with flowing and pulsating noises, very much like100 % distorted guitar via muffling, delaying and re-recording. And then throwing them over and over each other again and again. “Satan’s hard drive” – the other cd-only bonustrack – spontaneously created itself via Kid606’s broken hard drive and is almost nine minutes of pure digital break-up heaven or rather white-noise-power-electronics-hell. An electric guitar never did that by itself. As you know, some of the best things always come from mistakes. Such as LSD, but that is a whole different story, except for the fact that “satans hard drive” might be the auditive equivalent to a horrortrip on named substance.