K-the-i? – “Synesthesia” – [Fake Four Inc.]

This dude made a private symphony with his record collection. Come with him now on a journey through time and space. The Boston-born, LA-based DJ assembles a tour-de-force that is part breakbeat, part underground rap, part instrumental hip-hop, part oddball ambient and all trippy. The majority of ‘Synesthesia’ is instrumental– There is a brilliant sample at the beginning of t.1 concerning a little-discussed consideration of time travel, and three guest-raps, all excellent (t.s 3, 7, 9– Ceschi is particularly dizzying in his verse on t.3), as well as other scattered sampled voices (talking or, more commonly, singing), but this is a very oblique work, a wall of chopped-up noise that is difficult to find a comfortable hold on. Sounds like he had much more than just a turntable on his hands, i.e. a laptop, which takes this outside the realm of a traditional hip-hop DJ set. And how! Samples are chopped up so tiny that a glitchy feeling prevails throughout, there is an occasional passage of unrecognizable noise, and the time signature just keeps on changing. As far as I can tell (don’t quote me on this) there are no original recordings on the decks here, but K-The-I??? digs up some obscure old soul, vocal jazz, indie rock, et cetera to create something that sounds like nothing I’ve heard before. If your CD player started skipping while you were traveling at light-speed, on acid, it might sound something like this. For weirder moments check out Tim-Hecker-ish t. 4, the damaged pop of t.5 or panic-attack-provoking t. 8. Will ‘blow your mind.’