The aptly-titled ‘The Music is the Instrument’ is a jam session in the shape of a beat tape, a jazz combo that traded brass for MIDI pads, somewhere between sonic collage and instrumental hip-hop. The first sound we hear is not the music per se, but the environment it was created in, grounding the listener in a vivid sense of place: a field recording quite literally carries us from outside the studio into the speaker, our first stop on a free-flowing auditory journey with no one single direction in mind.
August Fanon and Six†een came to beat making through slightly different trajectories — August prolific legend of underground beat making, Six a classically-trained polymath — but they both possess a mutual talent for excavating melodies from unexpected sources. Theirs is an organic and intuitive partnership born from admiration for each other’s work, trust in their shared artistic instincts, and mutual love for the craft. The duo recruits a family of varied collaborators to bring their own musical impulses into the mix: tight drums from SOO DO KOO, textured vocals from Lamb Rabbit, razor-sharp raps from ‘89 the Brainchild, and poetry from nadine x. Snatches of sampled dialogue weave in and out, contextualizing the genesis of creation, breathing life into an ever-evolving organism that effortlessly mutates across styles.
The division between individual songs erodes into something more experiential, a waveform kaleidoscope of hazy loops and synthesizer flurries, like a sun-soaked summer where one day bleeds into the next. To call The Music Is The Instrument stream of consciousness would not give enough credit to the technical precision and compositional skill of the creators, but it glides like an unhurried river, carving out its own natural course from the surrounding landscape, unconcerned with how the combination of sounds might be classified or categorized; all that matters is letting the music speak for itself.
Purchase Cassette: August Fanon, six†een, Soo Do Koo & Lamb Rabbit – The Music Is The Instrument
Joyful Union Cassette Resource 