Bring The noise - 2/10/2005
Dalek and its block-rocking beats
Monolithic is a word that's bandied about haphazardly in music journalism. Too often it's just a fancy way to say "hefty" or "heavy." But then along comes an album such as Absence - the third full-length from Newark, N.J., hip-hop trio Dlek (pronounced dial-EKT) - and it becomes apparent that no other word can accurately describe the voluminous presence of the keening music.
Of course, I may be partially biased by my own experience. The first time I heard Absence was the summer of 2004 in the attic apartment of Will Brooks, aka MC Dlek. I was in New York on assignment and invited by the members of the group, who I'd met years earlier after a performance at MJQ, to get an exclusive preview of the album.
Sitting in Brooks' apartment alongside Dlek co-producer Alap Momin, aka Okt0pus (turntablist Hsi-Chang Lin, aka Still, rounds out the threesome, but he wasn't there), I was first introduced to the howling fury that is only now seeing release on Ipecac Records. And besides saying something ridiculously overwrought like, "it sounds like hell's tortured souls formed a chorus of the damned at summer camp," "monolithic" would be the way to best describe what I heard. Like the opening scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey, we sat in front of two trapezoid-shaped studio monitors, bobbing our heads to what Dlek intends as the first in a series of cohesive, loosely conceptual albums.
Think Public Enemy's Bomb Squad on bug powder dust. Dlek's drums are tribal calls to arms, martial and single-minded in their shuffle. The intention, says Momin, was to achieve burly beats that bang similarly to Mobb Deep and Smif-n-Wessun, where it's "no longer about the streets, it's about the projects." Since touring with Britain's Techno Animal, masters of low-end frequencies, Momin has been part of a friendly rivalry to play catch-up.
He accomplishes that by crafting a seismic quiver that rarely subsides. Atop those anchors is a maelstrom of steel-string banshees, which are snippets culled from a four-hour guitar-noise session. The result balances the British sense of feedback as enveloping ether, la My Bloody Valentine (especially on the nigh tribute "Ever Somber"), with a downtown New York atonality more reminiscent of the dissonant guitar symphonies of Glenn Branca.
Lyrically, Brooks wanted to be as obtusely confrontational as the music. His steadfast words are delivered as bleak bulk that befits the stocky MC. "Absence is a commentary on looking around at the world right now," he says, "the list of absences could be endless: real humanity, real freedom, real democracy - should I go on?"
Whereas Dlek's first release (1998's Negro, Necro, Nekros EP) was a studio project, 2002's From Filthy Tongue of Gods and Griots full-length was stylistically all over the place because the band was all over the place, touring and writing over the course of four years. Absence represents Dlek tightening its focus to draw from a specific phase of its musical development.
"The first record was more about the different things we were influenced by and how we could make them fit, like an experiment in sound," Momin says. "The second one, it was like, we know how to get the sound, so let's prove we can push it in a million directions - hip-hop, ambient, noise. From here on in, we've proven we have a range, so each record will focus on perfecting one sound. Absence is more 'Spiritual Healing' (off Filthy Tongue), but times 100. Each of four records we're working on past this one will fully explore another facet pulled from what we've shown we're capable of in the past."
Since the late '90s, Dlek has been proving turbulent hip-hop could be every bit as crushing as Slayer, and could stand toe-to-toe on stage with post-hardcore groups such as Dillenger Escape Plan, Rye Coalition and Isis. The group has collaborated with German experimentalists Faust while fetishizing Boogie Down Productions. In a restrictively delineated, commercially driven climate, Dlek's adherence to hip-hop's ideals is as monumental as Absence's sound is, well, monolithic.