One of the producers to have emerged from the Anticon
bubble, DJ Signify has since the late nineties shaped
his sound with his rare groove mix album Signifying
Breaks (1997) and his first album, Mixed Messages
(2000). Four years on, he returns with the stark and
bleak Sleep No More, partly recorded with Buck
65 and Sage Francis.
Sold as the soundtrack to an imaginary horror movie,
Sleep No More is hip-hop at its darkest and
most chilling. Far from the easy-going, churned out
tunes of the hi-flying rap class, DJ Signify haunts
the foggiest streets of town, kicking tramps and spitting
on the ground. Sleep No More is not the terrifying
affair the press release makes out, yet, it has a twisted,
almost psychotic, personality, circling above comatose
beats and stripped down backdrops, carving precious
little gems out of shards of lazy jazz, stern folk,
obnoxious funk and distilled grooves. Set to destabilise,
Signify builds slippery soundscapes, keeping them as
bare as possible, occasionally adding vocal samples
to put a bit of flesh on these bony assemblages. When
he sticks to instrumentals, Signify pushes his beats
into bleak corners, sometimes appearing to wander aimlessly,
as on the disconcerting Shatter & Splatter,
where nothing real seems to happen. Yet, when the surface
is scratched, the complexity of his constructions reveals
a surprising playfulness, almost as disturbing as the
bad tempered grooves and heavy mood that linger all
over this record. Although it generally works fine,
it would be too much to deal with if there weren’t
any recognisable pointers on the way, and that’s
where Buck 65 and Sage Francis help the matter, not
so much by endorsing the atmospheric nature of Sleep
No More as by bringing some human interaction.
The contrasting styles of Buck 65, constantly stumbling
on the tempo, and Francis, with his more elegantly classic
diction, provide some interesting nuances to Signify’s
grey backdrops. Rarely does this album ventures in slightly
more hospitable territories, yet on the stunning Winter’s
Going and Five Leaves Left (For Lauren),
there is something of a pastoral melancholy filtering
through. On the earlier, an acoustic guitar draws circles
in the background, toning down Buck 65’s unfortunate
tale of love and deception, while the later feeds on
the emotional impact of strings layered over radio interferences
and Mogadon beats. If Breath appears to inexorably draw
this album to a dramatic conclusion, it is with the
deliciously melancholic hidden track, with once again
Buck 65 on vocal duties, that Sleep No More
finally bows out and retreat to the hole it emerged
from just an hour earlier.
Far from being an easy record, Sleep No More
unveils its personality with time, and requires more
than one listen to appreciate its full scope. DJ Signify
crafts here an intriguing piece of work which, despite
occasionally loosing sight of its substance, sets out
to get under the listener’s skin and succeed all
too well.
4.5/5 |
