E-Mail This Article to a Friend Hip-hop heavies Dälek’s broad view of rap music BY TONY WARE
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Charting artistic evolution is never easy. The Newark hip-hop trio DŠlek (they pronounce it dial-ekt), however, have recorded at least one loose primer for what’s become the expansive hip-hop program. The politically minded insurgent bump-and-grindcore group are now touring behind Absence, their third release and their second full-length on Mike Patton’s Ipecac Records (they’ll be at the Middle East this Sunday). But it’s 2002’s From Filthy Tongue of Gods & Griots that etches their divergent possibilities, demarcating the paths the band now explore for mutable hip-hop.

DŠlek’s first release, 1998’s Negro, Necro, Nekros EP, was the kind of challenging salvo that can get a hip-hop act signed to a label like Ipecac, home of the Melvins and Patton’s various noisecore projects. Slayer, Public Enemy, My Bloody Valentine, and Eric B & Rakim were some of its obvious influences. Filthy Tongue distilled those influences into a succession of molds that set hip-hop wordplay against backdrops as varied as ambient textures, white noise, and polymetallic aggression.

"Filthy Tongue was all over the place because it was written over four years of touring," reveals Alap Momin, a/k/a DŠlek’s cloistered co-producer, Oktopus, in a rare phone interview. "Now we can draw from specific phases and put it in the music. We were touring for 17 months on Filthy Tongue, so in the van, I’d jot notes with ideas about whole records. From here on in, we’ve proven we have a range, so each record will focus on perfecting one sound. And Absence is the first in that series."

Absence sits firmly in the neighborhood of "Spiritual Healing," the lead track off Filthy Tongue. With bleak, concussive rhythm patterns in the lineage of Mobb Deep, Momin and Will Brooks (a/k/a MC/co-producer DŠlek) densely layer sturm und drang as Hsi-Chang Linaka (a/k/a DJ Still) adds caustic murk and piercing pointillism with turntables aided by guitar effects pedals.

Having toured and/or collaborated with artists as varied as Techno Animal, Faust, and the Melvins, DŠlek have made a commitment to be both voluminous and unyielding. For Absence, they chiseled a self-produced sample library from a four-hour guitar-noise recording session and used the feedback hooks to drape a veil of hypnotic drone, ˆ la My Blood Valentine, punctured by atonal clusters akin to Glenn Branca or early Sonic Youth. Crafted by Brooks in his attic apartment’s bedroom studio (which could help explain the bleary claustrophobia) and by Momin in his professionally outfitted facility, Absence is both stern and shamanistic. The disc’s music is located in a grimy neighborhood that’s more projects than streets. It’s a neighborhood where, Brooks explains, the attitude is "Go out there and handle your business whether people know or not, because nobody’s gonna give a shit so you gotta take shit while you take shit."

Hip-hop has been calling out "the roof is on fire" since Rockmaster Scott & the Dynamic Three dropped that house-rockin’ verse in 1984. Using his fierce free-form style, Brooks takes it steps farther, pointing the finger at guilty parties — and/or political parties. "People ask if this album would be different if Bush hadn’t been re-elected, but I don’t think something as trivial as an election will change the world so significantly. The problems before the election will be there a year after. The stuff I talk about on Absence didn’t happen overnight. Absence has songs about the prison system — literally, because a lot of stuff on this album is a lot more literal that on the first two CDs — but also prison systems figuratively, because what’s absent has a lot to do with missing freedoms and humanity.

"When a house is on fire, maybe the easy thing is to tell people the house is on fire. I don’t claim to be the fireman to put it out — if I had the answers, I don’t think I’d be making records — but I’m going to keep on being the person calling out that shit long as I can."

When discussing DŠlek’s unlikely but cohesive juxtapositions, Brooks and Momin drop influences as varied as A Tribe Called Quest and Morton Feldman, De La Soul and Bad Brains, Augustus Pablo and Spacemen 3. And they feel that all of that can become part of their expansive version of hip-hop. But for the time being, as the group tour in support of Absence, they’ve induced a kind of partial tunnel vision with tinnitus potential. "When I heard Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions (To Hold Us Back), I was thinking it made Slayer childish, and Slayer is still one of my favorite bands," Momin stresses. "I go back to draw on that, because I want kids who think, say, Disturbed are heavy to see hip-hop can still be heavier than any record they’ve heard."

DŠlek perform this Sunday, February 13, upstairs at the Middle East, 472 Massachusetts Avenue in Central Square, with Bastille and Emok; call (617) 864-EAST.