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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Seoul producer Yetsuby’s music, like that of her duo Salamanda, is a jumble of brightly colored baubles: marbles and beach glass, sequins and gumdrops, all spun into mesmerizingly symmetrical abstractions. You might be momentarily reminded of Hiroshi Yoshimura, Steve Reich, ’90s ambient, and fantastical video-game soundtracks, yet the references float by so gently and swiftly that you’re too swept up in the downy tumult to think too closely about them. But there’s a moment on Yetsuby’s new album 4EVA that’s so uncharacteristically strident, it might make you wonder if someone else’s audio files got mixed in with hers on the way to the mastering engineer.
“SOUNDCLOUD”—a title, a genre, a browser tab?—begins more or less like her most upbeat tracks typically do, with a beat made of balloon squeaks and finger snaps. But the offbeats are punctuated by what might be the trumpeting of a tetchy elephant; an agitated teakettle adds a dash of pandemonium. Egged on by rushing, rolling breakbeats, gruffly squawking cut-up vocals further stoke the frantic mood. It sounds like a Bomb Squad tribute fronted by a harried Dizzee Rascal and recorded on a diet of Pop Rocks and Coke.
The garishness of the sensory overload marks the song as an outlier in Yetsuby’s catalog, but it shares the restlessly inventive spirit found in the rest of her work. In the context of the new album, “SOUNDCLOUD” signals Yetsuby’s refusal to fall back on old patterns. On 4EVA, she’s determined to try new things, even if they risk damaging the veneer of her typically beatific music. It’s her most energetic record yet, heavily informed by contemporary club styles though rarely reducible to any one sound or mood.
The album opens with a fake-out. “s2WINGS s2” begins as a soft explosion of gold dust, filigreed layers of wordless Auto-Tune tracing curlicues atop thrumming chimes and dewdrop synths; it sounds a little bit like Skrillex’s “With You, Friends (Long Drive)” reimagined by beatless techno wiz Barker. It gathers steam as it goes, levels rising as though it’s about to peak in a concussive drop. Instead, having reached some imperceptible zenith, it simply dissolves into a fine spray of acoustic guitar artifacts, like Jim O’Rourke’s Eureka run through an atomizer. “FLY,” which follows, might be a remix of the same sound files: same tempo, same angelic coo, same pointillistic pastel rush. The drums are punchier, the groove more pronounced, but the predominant feeling is an almost overwhelming oxytocin glow, a tidal wave of bliss.
Things briefly get heavier: “Aestheti-Q” rides a brisk, syncopated drum pattern and a barrage of monosyllabic vocal samples fashioned into a hiccuping arpeggio. But even in the album’s most insistent moments, what stands out is the high-def quality of her production—like a flickering handclap sound hard-panned across the stereo channels, making you feel like you’re flanked by a pair of militant hummingbirds. Crystalline sounds come in waves, a gentle juggernaut of prismatic streamers and laser zaps—Jersey club reimagined as a geyser of diamonds.
The album’s back half turns weirder and more freeform. “;P” drifts like an amorphous cloud of metallic space debris, Wall-E chirps and warbling Auto-Tune lending an emotional center to the chaos. The title track pairs children’s choirs with xylophone and chunky breakbeats, a rave anthem for a cartoon paradise. And “Where is my..” and “aaa1” fold in music boxes and ’60s jazz, Hollywood strings and cricket chirps, before “I AM 뇌로운 인간” closes the album out with the shirred textures—crinkling up voice, guitar, and synths like wads of colored cellophane—that DJ Koze loves so much.
The song’s title comes from a childhood portrait of the artist drawn by her younger sister, accompanied by the Korean-language caption “나는 뇌로운 인간” (I am a brain-ful human)—a misspelling of what should have read “외로운 인간” (lonely human). Yetsuby calls the song a meditation on solitude, and a certain sense of melancholy does bleed through its intricate counterpoints. But that accidental reference to the artist’s “brain-ful” nature feels apt. Surrounded by fantastical designs of her own invention, she reminds me of Blade Runner’s J.F. Sebastian and his genetically engineered menagerie of cuddly, bumptious critters. With an imagination like hers, Yetsuby will always have someone to keep her company.
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