Mixtape City: Dean Blunt of Hype Williams, The Narcissist II
Mixtape City is a new irregular feature about mixtapes, proper or otherwise, brand new and otherwise, up to and including regular old internet-style mixes made for or posted by radio, blogs, and underground clubs. Mixtapes/mixes will be posted INPO, but all of them are important and either diverted me from or further informed things I was listening to already. Download/streams will be included.
Previously in Mixtape City:
OC Mixtape Series #11: Total Freedom
Highly-curated is not a descriptor I tire of easily, or get tired of looking for. That’s not much the case for Cinematic w/r/t music, although filmic does quite nicely instead. Cinematic always means you have to imagine a movie happening alongside the music, whereas a set of songs that bends toward the filmic just has the proper sense of place and you wouldn’t think of it as complementing anything besides itself, at all.
Andy Butler of Hercules & Love Affair once compared early house recordings to fine art and in their airiest aspect it’s true of so many of those tracks, near-untouchable in their use of space and angle. In literature you could say that about the best kinds of short stories; in music, the best kinds of mixtapes can resemble short stories.
The Narcissist II, since it appeared on the internet a few days ago, has been called an album and maybe with its use of fade-outs it pretends toward that a little, but it’s better as a single-track mixtape because it reflects all the nervous, skidding touches of a late-night scavenger hunt at gunpoint. Dean Blunt is part of Hype Williams, one of those-cloak-and-dagger internet-only projects that all of us dreamed up together, almost—better to not think of them as being real people (their next album is under their IRL names, Blunt and Inga Copeland, whatever). The Narcissist II, with its splatterpaint of pale RnB and devastated dub, perfects that spectral aesthetic—found footage, voice-over, piped-in desperation, and culled sound effects from the gunshot-and-siren queue snap through things like dead wires.
All the material is new and unnamed except the one at the end, a beautiful Portishead-y heart murmur called “Choice of a New Generation” which has Copeland on it and is from the album (I think). Right after it Blunt startles with a bullet-like rap that’s over almost as soon as it begins, bleeding out into half-past the thirtieth and last minute of the mix. The other song fragments, which is basically what they present as, are by turns sad, benumbed, bewitched, and ugly as a cigarette burn on a crackhead’s asscheek. If you could time your walk from the 19th Street Oakland BART to your grimy doorstep to perfectly coincide with this, you’d about have it. It’s post-internetism in thirty minutes or less—or it’s free (it’s free anyway).
