Avast, it’s the all new 9th Dan Beatmaker Series on WYWRadio where we follow the trail of sickness produced by upcoming Beatmakers who are one paradigm shift away from knocking out such a ridiculous album that you will have to hide your MPC in the shame cupboard with all your other failed endeavors.
#1 – Honks Burry / Blameful Isles
To stand out in the music game, you either have to be rocking some serious marketing support and be willing to wear nasty booty shorts, or you have to bring the deepness. Yo, so here’s a picture of Daniel Israelson aka Honks Burry in some fine ass batty-riders.
OK kidding. Seriously though, we’re not talking about some blunted kid smoking out the window in his bedroom, while his mum knocks him up chicken kiev n chips. This boy is on some concept album shit and that is no mean feat for someone who is 20 y.o and has only been making beats for just over a year.
So what’s the story? 19 year old leaves behind a gig as a drummer in a Jazz/Blues/Rock band and moves from native Sweden to spend a year in China. Like many drummers, a dude starts adding electronic gear to his repertoire, building textures on top of his live drums with MPC, Maschine, synths and other weapons from a beatmakers arsenal. Mr Israelson becomes Mr Honks Burry, there is solace and confidence to be gained from adopting a moniker as Metal Face will tell you and the beats spew forth in prodigious amounts. This is quality loops, beat tape business with strong Donut influences, the dude is out the blocks with straight ahead shit that swings. There is a jazz influence there, but unlike other drummers that take to the pads, say Shigeto, the drums aren’t mad complicated, they anchor the tunes but it’s the samples that provide the interest – the honky tonk piano stabs of ‘nightly adventures’ the big Mccoy Tyner block chords, afro-jazz elements; cluster bells, Pharaoh flutes, an ability to weave dissonant melodies. It’s all solid, what makes it interesting is the wonk, the fracturedness, the odd woozy, psychedelic freak out ala brother Madlib. He’s experimenting like all good Jazz headz, that’s what you do, you just go out and play, keep having those conversations, only this is one dude in conversation with himself.
Here’s an hours worth of Honks he kindly slung together for WYW:
G Volume records
It’s dope, it is, because you can begin to sense this musician starting to be able to properly express himself through the music and that’s not such a simple thing to do when your chopping. There is a lot of music, too much music, some of it hits the recycle bin!
Burry turns 20 and moves back to live in Stockholm, at which point, I shit you not, he has a dream, and in the dream is Blameful Isles, it’s not an AKA, it’s a fictional place where Israelson’s creative imagination and subconscious meet to make emotionally connected music that’s heavy as a cherry pie eating champion.
The Blameful Isles project (out on the excellent Urban Waves imprint) is just a stunning, fathom’s deep piece of beatmaking. This nodsmith is suddenly plugged in from heart to MPC in a way that your average producer certainly aint. Don’t get me wrong, it cracks but it cracks in this melancholy way that makes it unlike most other Hip Hop because it’s about feelin not frontin. There is mad depth to the songs, hi-hat heavy funk drums lick like Daddy Dave, resonant bass lines follow the melodies up through layers of sampled brass to where soloists drop in and out with looped keys that reform into transcendental riffs. The whole EP has this opiatic sway to it that makes it completely cohesive, and like all quality sampledelia you forget it’s not a band – some quartet of ex hepcats lost in an apocalypse now jungle hideaway some place.
It’s the jump in scope and execution of ‘Bound to Ohra’ that has us truly excited about what this producer has in the locker. We’ve heard there is more Ohra business to come and we are mighty glad. There is definitely space for some spiritual jazz beatology in our record collections and we reckon it’s coming from Stockholm. Proper 9th Dan.
HB has very kindly slipped us a couple of exclusive offerings, an unreleased B.I joint and something from a ‘future realm’ CHK CHK
Check the rest of Honk’s crew yonder:
PeaKing
More soon
Duchamp