Hip-Hop Lives Here
Hip-Hop Lives Here
The London jazz musician’s sprawling suite explores the vital function of breath in times of distress. The music can be tranquil, but it also formally mimics the act of calming down.
When you are engulfed in panic, you’re supposed to breathe. In through your nose, out through your mouth. Slowly, and with purpose. Rhythmically filling and emptying your lungs is said to relieve inner turmoil. But what if the very act of focused respiration, the effort of making an involuntary task intentional, inflames that panic? What if air is simply not available? In Breathe Suite, London composer and multi-instrumentalist Ben Marc (né Neil Charles) examines this paradox. His swirling arrangements—which synthesize jazz, hip-hop, neoclassical, and electronic—explore multiple aspects of breath: its inherent meter, vital function, and what happens when it’s stifled.
Breathe Suite consists of four interconnected pieces that recycle instrumental and verbal motifs: two suites with guest vocalists, and two improvisational pieces. Not intending to create a full EP, Marc wrote opener “Breathe Suite A” during the initial months of lockdown and enlisted singer MidnightRoba to contribute lyrics and vocals. “Once Midnight heard it, she asked for a longer version. I was adamant that this was the arrangement,” Marc said in a recent interview. “Whilst the conversation was being had, George Floyd was murdered.” Shaken, Marc extended the piece, adding dramatic string layers and opalescent harp. From that point, the EP took on a life of its own. Marc recruited artists from London’s jazz community and set out to make a record that could soothe in times of trauma. Breathe Suite can be tranquil, but it also formally mimics the act of calming down, the deep inhalations and the things we tell ourselves to curb distress.
Breathe Suite’s main recurring motif is a recording of a children’s choir. Their refrain reappears throughout: “I’ll raise my voice/You raise your hand/I’ll hold the truth/Until you understand.” Their voices are loose and uninhibited. They sound like normal kids rather than trained choristers, an intentional and effective choice by Marc, who wanted their presence to represent youth and innocence. A second motif is the simple but insistent repetition of “breathe.” Its urgent rhythm mimics quickened breath, like forceful exhales into a paper bag.
These patterns adopt different tones depending on Marc’s arrangements; on “Breathe Suite A,” they are meditative and melodic. On “Breathe Improv A” and “Breathe Improv B,” they become fraught. “Breathe Improv A” is scored solely by Marc’s bowed double bass, and its ominous, sickly timbre makes the command to “breathe, breathe, breathe” sound like hyperventilation. On “Breathe Improv B,” Marc buries the choir beneath metallic pangs of synthesizer, trapping their voices between its sharp edges. The allusion to breath in this context cannot be separated from the deaths of George Floyd and Eric Garner, men whose air was literally taken from them.
If anything protrudes from Marc’s sprawling compositions, it is a pair of verses from London musician and singer Rarelyalways on “Breathe Suite B.” Structurally the song resembles its companion piece, “Breathe Suite A,” but instead of being lifted by MidnightRoba’s satin register, it feels weighed down. Rarelyalways has a blunt, round voice that works well on his own music, but punches through Marc’s sweeping arrangements with dull jabs. Phrases like “Goodfellas” and “Dave Chappelle” rupture the glittering plane of viola, cello, and harp, and their context isn’t clear from a close reading of the lyrics. Marc’s piece feels grand and cosmic, while Rarelyalways riffs on the mundane. It’s not a bad performance, but it seems bulky and thrown-on.
Despite the distraction, “Breathe Suite B” includes a stellar performance from woodwind maestro Shabaka Hutchings, of trailblazing jazz groups Sons of Kemet and the Comet Is Coming. Hutchings is an acrobatic player, and his insistent, nudging clarinet bends and flutters before launching into a feverish solo during the choir refrain. Hutchings’ skronking bristles against Marc’s loping cello, suggesting a deep-sown tension. It is a performance of crisis—the rage that bubbles in each breath and can’t be pacified.
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On June 7, 2023, the sky above New York turned an eerie orange. People across the city looked up to see the air thick with smoke, carrying the sharp scent of wildfires that had drifted down from Canada. It was a startling moment, more alarming than a strangely warm November day but less directly dangerous than an active blaze in your own neighborhood. For many living on the East Coast, it was simply surreal. The air felt heavy and golden, and yet, everyday routines continued without pause.
“Something in the Air,” the second single from the Antlers’ new record Blight, depicts this environmental event, or at least one that mirrors it closely. If the Antlers have been unfairly labeled a “sad” band, this song won’t do much to change that. Peter Silberman, the group’s longtime creative force, sings with a trembling voice, “Oh, keep your window closed today.” Rather than fully grasping the strange intensity of the moment or facing its unsettling implications, the song leans into ordinary habits: “Oh, be sure to charge your phone today/Oh, maybe work from home today,” he sings softly.
Since their rise to prominence, the Antlers have specialized in songs that linger in deep emotional pain. Titles like “Shiva,” “Wake,” and “Putting the Dog to Sleep” offer a glimpse of the grief they’ve often explored. Back in 2009, their breakthrough album Hospice used a cancer ward as a backdrop for songs about a crumbling relationship, becoming a defining blog-era classic. Silberman now widens that lens, shifting from personal sorrow to collective mourning—what’s often referred to as “eco-grief.” Blight, the band’s seventh album, is presented as a song cycle about the climate crisis. Its nine tracks dwell on pollution (“Pour,” “Calamity”), complacency (“Consider the Source”), and looming environmental collapse (“A Great Flood”). Yet despite the weight of its subject, the music often lacks the sense of urgency or emotional release that once defined Silberman’s most powerful work.
Silberman wrote much of the album while walking around the land near his home studio in upstate New York. During those walks, he noticed a neighbor clearing part of the forest to make space for vehicles. That observation sparked songs like “Carnage,” which starts with spare synth and voice before exploding into a stormy full-band climax, packed with striking imagery—a decapitated snake, a toad crushed under a tire. “Accidental damage,” Silberman sings as the music breaks open in a rugged guitar solo. The title track reaches for the same vividness, describing “chawed up trees with skeletal leaves.” It also hints at his growing interest in electronic sounds, as skittering drum loops by drummer Michael Lerner weave through the latter half of the track, twisting like something alive and mutating.
That raw, immediate energy doesn’t carry into the longer pieces like “Something in the Air” and “Deactivate.” Those songs drift along on delicate arpeggios and mournful vocals but never find their shape. The Antlers have always embraced slow, ethereal soundscapes, but on earlier records those sounds still carried high emotional stakes and bursts of intensity. Here, they look straight at the scale of environmental disaster and end up with little more than a quiet sigh.
Throughout the record, Silberman circles around the question of responsibility for the climate crisis. He often points the finger at himself—or at people like him—everyday consumers who toss out disposable items without a second thought. There’s sincerity in that guilt, but it doesn’t always translate into compelling lyrics. “Is it enough to add to cart with buyer’s remorse?/Well, if you don’t know where to start, consider the source,” he sings on “Consider the Source,” an opener that echoes the warm, glowing mood of 2021’s Green to Gold. A few tracks later, the opening verse of “Blight” takes a more pointed tone: “Quickly, I need it!/Shipped in a day/Oceans away.” The words are blunt, leaving little room for interpretation.
This kind of introspection has merit, but it’s hard to ignore what’s missing. The album shows little anger toward the corporations, fossil fuel magnates, and politicians who have driven the climate crisis for profit. Everyday consumers are not without fault, of course, but there are far greater powers at play. In contrast, Tamara Lindeman of The Weather Station painted a chilling portrait of those forces in “Robber” from 2021’s Ignorance. That kind of confrontation is largely absent in the Antlers’ view of the world.
Perhaps that’s why Blight feels oddly detached for a record about an inherently political subject. In 2025, when the Environmental Protection Agency has been gutted and national parks stripped of funding by a science-denying administration, the quiet ambivalence in Silberman’s writing stands out. The album contains flashes of anger and guilt but not a clear sense of resistance. On the final track, “A Great Flood,” Silberman sings gently, “Of this I’m uncertain/Will we be forgiven?” The question hangs heavy, like the smoke-filled sky it reflects. Another, more pressing question lingers behind it: Who exactly is “we”?
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