Blue Sky Black Death – Glaciers
From backpacks to snapbacks, the career of Blue
Sky Black Death has spanned more than a decade of genre evolution
and artistic growth. After starting separately as beat makers
during the golden age of indie hip-hop in the late 90s, the duo
united and expanded their repertoire in 2006 with the double album
A Heap Of Broken Images. The rst disc of this album was their rst
ocial foray into purely instrumental work. Subsequently they have
pursued both avenues, collaborating with several rappers while also
releasing two more instrumental suites – Late Night Cinema and
Noir. Paying homage to their mutual appreciation of southern rap
traditions in a historically unique way, the duo also created
chopped & screwed version of these albums, respectively called
Lean Night Cinema and Noir + Violet. Striving to continue progress
into unexpected directions, Blue Sky Black Death now present their
most ambitious and original work yet. Glaciers is a culmination of
years of experimentation, a realization of ideas which were only
hinted at in their previous eorts. While the tag ‘instrumental
hip-hop’ could still be applied nominally, the duo’s appreciation
of post-rock, shoegaze and prog-rock makes for a daring sonic blend
far removed from the repetitive loops and structures traditionally
associated with this genre. This departure from convention is
accentuated further by cameos from fellow Fake Four Inc. signees
Child Actor and singer JMSN. Their collaborations with BSBD are
symbiotic, marked by mutual testing of comfort zones, the guests
and their hosts pushing each other beyond boundaries of previous
experience. To ensure that the presentation of Glaciers is as
unique as its contents, the cover was commissioned to the
multi-talented Maxime Buchi; a notable tattooist, designer and
creative director of the cult favorite Sang Bleu magazine. Even
when accounting for the continuously blurring lines between rap
production and electronic and ambient music, what happens on
Glaciers still stands as nearly unprecedented. Simply put, the aim
here is to go big. In one regard this means longer songs, with
several tracks reaching over 10 minutes. But beyond just length,
there is a sense of operatic grandiosity that imbues even the
album’s shorter entries. The group has combined samples with live
instrumentation before, but never so dramatically and profoundly as
now. The listener is placed directly into the eye of the storm as
all around him chords and vocals swell and fall, awash in sweeping
waves of synth and bass. The effect is sometimes chaotic but never
violent. Blue Sky Black Death craft music of tumultuous beauty;
music at once both exciting and soothing. Predicated on this
contradiction, their compositions coalesce into a singular harmony.
They form a new terrain from disparate building blocks, a vast
alien expanse of sound waiting to be explored.
