These days the expansion of Japanese musicians into the European labels surprises greatly. Either Europe is lack of original and talented musicians or Japanese musicians gained such high quality of their music that it's impossible to pass over them. Dj Krush was one of the pioneers in Japanese hip-hop culture, and nowadays his countrymen dj Kentaro and Rainstick Orchestra have their releases on Scape records.Unusual hip-hop projects always attracted attention of the Scape, this label has already released the works of such original teams as Bus and Headset, who influenced both the label's catalogue and hip-hop movement intself. The title of album Cappablack is called Facades & Skeletons - certain special sense of the title (the inner nature and outward structure of all the objects round us contrast greatly). You can feel these contrasts in the album only after very attentive listening to its tracks.
Behind the cartoon samples and their unexpected combinations are hidden critical social texts, political position and the musicians' own point of view according all the events happening all over the world.
Compositions "Evil Clap", "5th Dimensionare" some kind of the musicians' response to the USA's penetration into Iraq. We can easily mention the parallels between Cappablack and the project Antipop Consortium with Warp. Both these teams are not indifferent to the things happening nowadays, they are interested in politics, that makes them original, dangerous and unordinary. Despite its social texts, music of Cappablack is also interesting due to its synthesis - the hip-hop roots and the distinct influence of such microwave musicians as Ryoji Ikeda, Carsten Nicolai(Alva Noto) and Oval. We can say for sure that for both members of this project iLLEVEN and Hashim B it's not just hip-hop, but something more important and urgent. Such attitude to music becomes extremely obvious after listening to the compositions called "Hear no Speak no", "City of Amnesia", "Suikinkutsu". The sound associations after listening to Cappablack lead us to the original sound of the Ninja Tune's flourishing period. Nevertheless team's sounding has its own originality, it's fascinating and far more interesting than almost all the new releases of Ninja Tune and their hip-hop sublabel Big Dada.
- Cappablack
- Scape records