Hip-Hop Lives Here
Hip-Hop Lives Here
The Los Angeles–based musicians explore the spaces between their respective styles, yielding an ethereal, richly textured fusion of neo-classical and musique concréte.
Sarah Davachi and Sean McCann’s personal and artistic lives are intimately intertwined. Working out of their shared home in Los Angeles, both artists carve out marbled slabs of sound art, each taking their own unique approach to neo-classical music. McCann has styled himself as a sort of DIY Gavin Bryars, overseeing his label Recital Program and assembling ornate passages of home-recorded chamber music to create a new kind of basement-show Baroque. Davachi takes after deep-listening gurus like Pauline Oliveros and Randal McLellan, hanging her songs on endless strings of soft organ and Mellotron chords that wrap the listener in a velvety analog glow. On Mother of Pearl, their first record together as a couple, Davachi and McCann explore the spaces shared between their respective styles of music, yielding a warm, ethereal vision of musique concréte stripped down to the very bone.
An animating principle of both Davachi and McCann’s music has been a devotion to the Fluxus art movement of the 1960s, whose philosophy might be best summed up by founder George Maciunas: “Coffee cups can be more beautiful than fancy sculptures. A kiss in the morning can be more dramatic than a drama by Mr. Fancypants. The sloshing of my foot in my wet boot sounds more beautiful than fancy organ music.” In this fashion, Mother of Pearl uncovers epiphanies in the duo’s kitchen sink as Davachi and McCann combine farmhouse field recordings, tape distortion, plinking keys, and silence itself to create an autumnal bath of golden tones. The music on Mother of Pearl is just barely there, yet its spectral ebb and flow conjures blurry images of dim, candle-lit rooms, or suns setting on ancient buildings that haven’t felt footsteps for centuries. As slight as the album may seem, Mother of Pearl’s greatest rewards come from listening closely, where all of Davachi and McCann’s textures can reveal their delicate wrinkles.
Throughout Mother of Pearl, McCann and Davachi find a gentle middle ground between the dizzying surrealism of the former’s work and the subtly hypnotic drift of the latter’s. “LA in the Rain” spends eight minutes hovering over a veil of creaking violas and twinkling piano, dancing like dust particles settling in the sunlight. Davachi and McCann constantly keep their sounds at the edge of tangibility, reveling in the tension of their elegant in-betweenness. The most sublime track is the album’s centerpiece, “Lamplighter,” where the two musicians plunge into a ghostly reverie of rumbling bass, softly ringing bells, and cycling waves of tape hiss. On the surface, it seems to convey an all-encompassing emptiness, yet there are details—like the strangely soothing tapping timbre that appears around six minutes in, or the cows that begin to moo toward the end of the track—that turn the whole piece into a balancing act between darkness and light, a richly layered world heard from the deepest possible depths.
There are limits to how microscopic Davachi and McCann can make their music while still achieving something profound; on “Band of Gold,” two guitars spiral aimlessly without ever quite achieving the textural complexity of the rest of the album. But for much of Mother of Pearl, Davachi and McCann continually create musicality from the barest of fabrics, spinning them out into loose tapestries. It’s the kind of music that seems to disappear when you first put it on, but will slowly transform your entire environment. Like reading old love letters from couples long ago, it seems to speak a private language all its own.
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Isaiah Rashad does not hide behind metaphors on his latest album, It’s Been Awful. The title alone tells listeners exactly where his head has been. Honesty has always been central to Rashad’s music, from his breakthrough 2016 project The Sun’s Tirade to 2021’s The House Is Burning. Across his career, the Top Dawg Entertainment artist has carved out his own lane with hazy Southern rap, neo soul textures, and deeply personal songwriting that often goes far deeper emotionally than many of his peers.
Rashad’s previous album arrived after a difficult period involving homelessness and rehab, and this new record comes following another painful chapter in his life. Between relapses, fractured family relationships, and the invasion of privacy that followed the leak of a sex tape in 2022, It’s Been Awful feels like the sound of someone confronting everything at once. He wastes no time addressing it on opening track ‘The New Sublime’, where he raps, “Feel afflicted, falling over / Ask me who I’m fucking, I been fucking up.” The song dives into his fears around sobriety, his sister’s incarceration, and the emotional impact these struggles have on the people closest to him.
Themes of addiction and self destruction continue to run through the album. On ‘Same Sh!t’, a track carrying influences from A$AP Rocky and Skepta, Rashad references substance abuse directly with the line, “The pills, the blow, the ‘yac, the top,” while nodding to classic Lil Jon energy. ‘M.O.M’ captures the cycle of temptation and compromise as he tries to resist one vice only to replace it with another. Elsewhere, he speaks openly about the physical damage these habits have caused, admitting, “The doctor say that shit been fucking with my heart / but I can’t barely sleep / chasing money, love and all of the amphetamines.”
The emotional weight deepens on ‘Act Normal’, where Rashad examines generational trauma and learned behaviors passed through family lines, reflecting on “Acquired secrets / Learned to be the best at it.” Then on ‘Do I Look High?’, he strips away any remaining distance between himself and the listener with one of the album’s most vulnerable admissions: “Last time that I told you that I was clean, I was lying / I’m praying that my sister makes it home by Christmas morning.” The album’s brutally detailed storytelling may feel heavy for some listeners, but that raw specificity is exactly what gives the project its emotional power.
Still, It’s Been Awful is not consumed entirely by darkness. Rashad has spoken about music as something healing and transformative, and throughout the album he refuses to let despair completely swallow him. Inspired by artists like Prince and OutKast, the project carries a warm, sun faded atmosphere that softens the pain without hiding it. ‘Supaficial’ glides forward with bright trumpet accents while Rashad casually delivers lines like, “Where you going? You a junkie, you been way outside.” Meanwhile, ‘Happy Hour’ turns emotional exhaustion into something strangely melodic, pairing confessional lyrics with dreamy piano production. At its best, the album feels like Southern rap drifting through late night R&B haze during a summer drive with the windows down.
On ‘Superpwrs’, Rashad sums up the cycle he seems trapped inside, asking, “How I get sober, fucked up, then clean again, I don’t know,” before acknowledging his own disappearing acts from music with, “How you be rapping circles around n****s, but you don’t drop, I don’t know.” His skill has never been the issue. The real obstacle has always been life itself. But with It’s Been Awful, Isaiah Rashad delivers one of his most honest and affecting projects yet, making it impossible to overlook him any longer.
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