Slauson Malone A Quiet Farwell, 2016-2018 (Crater Speak) / Vergangenheitsbewältigung (Crater Speak)

Label / Grand Closing/NTS
Category / Experimental, Jazzy Hip-Hop, Abstract, Glitch, Neo Soul
Code / GC001

Genre-melted stream of consciousness cut-n-paste headmelt from NYC oddball Slauson Malone, who deconstructs US Black history across two interconnected self-produced albums of fractured funk, concréte noise and freeform rap. RIYL Space Afrika, Madlib, L'Rain, JPGMAFIA, Babyfather. Jasper Marsalis is a complicated artist, and these two albums - released in 2019 and 2020 respectively - present a puzzle to unravel, a multi-faceted, literate flex of references, extensions and sober political truths. "A Quiet Farewell" is his ambitious self-produced debut, and "Vergangenheitsbewältigung" followed a year later, picking up where its predecessor left off and re-contextualizing many of its themes and motifs. The name itself is a German word used to describe the struggle to overcome the problems of the past - a concept that's accepted in Germany but remains controversial in the USA, where forgetfulness is a priority. Even today, Black-centered education, protest and voting equality is met with hostility and litigation by an empowered white right desperate to wash their hands of the past without acknowledging its impact on the present. Marsalis was moved to write the records after reading "Scenes of Subjection", an acclaimed book by Saidiya Hartman that illustrates the roots of Black identity, archiving plantation diaries, theater, slave performance, storytelling, and even court cases. Hartman deconstructs the relationship between domination and entertainment, a theme that Marsalis picks up on immediately, melting together interconnected musical Black forms and fluidly dripping from melancholy to joy, and from anger to jubilation. None of this conceptual or musical weight should be too surprising, given Marsalis' background. He's the son of world-famous trumpet player and jazz evangelist Wynton Marsalis and already a successful painter, and was a member of Standing on the Corner, the NYC experimental jazz/hip-hop troupe best known for collaborating with Solange, Earl Sweatshirt, Danny Brown and others. This multi-faceted experience and layered knowledge forms the music's backbone, giving it depth that's often hard to come by. While they're not rap albums, hip-hop is one of the meridians that guides Marsalis through both records. His artist name is even a subtle tug at rap history, pointing at Marsalis' LA roots as well as harmonizing with the late Nipsey Hussle's self-mythologizing. On 'THE MESSAGE', that's split into multiple parts across both records, Marsalis re-interprets The Temptations' 'Message From a Black Man', a refrain that echoes thru rap history, referenced and sampled by everyone from Afrika Bambaataa and 2 Live Crew to MF DOOM and RZA. In Marsalis's hands, this familiar loop is transmuted into damaged rock, jangly emo-folk, blunted ambience and Autotuned gospel, offering a connecting thread that lashes the disjointed pieces together. 'Smile' is another track that's splintered across the two full-lengths; the first parts are "A Quiet Farewell"'s central moments, 'Smile #1' featuring Bronx multi-instrumentalist and rapper Caleb Giles and 'Smile #2' featuring baritone-voiced LA lo-fi dreamer Maxo. As "Vergangenheitsbewältigung" opens, Marsalis slops thru three more approximations of the song, pulling it into its constituent parts like its prog-rock modeling clay. Approaching his motifs with this level of flexibility, it's hard not to compare Marsalis to Madlib, who took a similarly green-hued and self-referential approach to his milestone Quasimoto albums, but Marsalis is even more unhooked from genre or expectation. He doesn't have much to prove, so jazz and hip-hop simply bubble in the mix as the album slops from doomy folk to tape collage and derelict sound art. And it's Marsalis's grasp of context that's most important to the listening experience. Each track is tied to a page number that corresponds to the text "Crater Speak", an intentional assemblage of snippets, notes, text messages, poems and illustrations that helps the listener properly piece together Marsalis's philosophical landscape. Like the music itself, it's a puzzle constructed from pieces of other puzzles, and it's a bit of a mad experience to absorb both the book and the albums in parallel. Bit of a stunner this one (two).

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Slauson Malone A Quiet Farwell, 2016-2018 (Crater Speak) / Vergangenheitsbewältigung (Crater Speak)

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