By Kangsen Feka Wakai
“The power of music to stir the feelings is actually at the center of the musical experience. This power is the reason music is more art than science. The range of feeling music can express is broad—from the mournful funeral march which constitutes the second movement of Beethoven’s Symphony no. 3 to the exuberant ‘Wedding March’ from Mendelsshon’s Midsummer Night’s Dream music,” contends Leonard G. Ratner in his treatise on music, The Musical Experience.
From the murderous bass lines in Dr. Dre’s Chronic to the melodic orchestrations of Dilla’s motor city tracks, these beats become tunnels into the universes in which its creators inhabit. For the good doctor of rap, it was the festive grime of Compton meanwhile for Dilla, it was the soulful rustiness of Motown.
In the moldy universe of dust-blowing crate-diggers the vinyl is sacred and indispensable. It is more than a prized collector’s item with an intimidating prize tag on its sleeve. In the subterranean universe of musicology, the vinyl becomes a revered platform for engaging discourse in rhythm and melody making it the most basic ingredient in the alchemy of sounds.
In the beginning…of hip-hop that is, vinyl was king. The DJ was King. Kool Herc was king. That is no longer the case even though sonic collectives like the Executioners continue to wax on. Thanks to them and acid jazz heads vinyl is still relevant in this ipod age.
Anyways, when down-tempo electronica made its revival in the dusk of the last millennium stretching all the way to this millennium’s dawn, DJ Sun built for himself a solid reputation amongst acid jazz and hip-hop heads with his rare, smoky and tempered mixes. He was Houston’s sonic window taking listeners to worlds beyond his Monday night at Café Brazil’s in Houston’s micro-Bohemia.
Sun is a sonic alchemist. Okay, he is a DJ. But then, he is more than that. In fact, he is a staple in the schizophrenic and slow moving current that is Houston’s underground musical scene. He is a producer and host of Saturday night’s Soular Grooves on Houston’s Pacifica radio KPFT 90.1.
His latest, Monday Drive EP, finds the veteran taking the reigns as executor and dispenser of perhaps the most progressive hip-hop album to come out of the Gulf. The opening track begins with an electro-friendly hooks and repetitive drum loops that play like a scene off Top of the Pops, circa nineteen eighty-five. It ushers the listener to Sun’s world of what he calls merry music, which is essentially hip-hop track with an accelerated boom-bap drum pattern and rhythm heavy break-beat. It plays like a buffet of experiences lived and imagined. It is at times danceable, hypnotic, provocative and gritty. All in all it is hip-hop. In a way, the opening track embodies the entire EP, which is a sojourn into the sights and sounds that have characterized Sun’s personae and now his art. There are hints of the Amazon, India and the rural-like slums of urban Houston.
By the way, Sun was born in Holland of Surinamese background. He split his first fourteen years between Holland and Suriname before relocating to Houston as a teenager. Monday Drive EP is his testimony to movement and the transcendence of space. It is almost a journal of his journey. A trek that criss-crosses continents and cultures. Monday Drive is the producer’s interpretation of the different sounds he’s heard from within himself and from without. In this EP, Sun, a mainstay of the Houston underground dares to take the music [hip-hop] forward and almost confirms the notion that producers do make the best hip-hop albums, anyways those that seem to stand the test of time.
Monday Drive EP is Sun’s contribution to the musical experience. t is his tribute to a musical experience well lived. It is his homage to the ritual of crate digging—his ode to the influence of vinyl.
Click here for digital downloads of Monday Drive EP
Mixes and schedule on Soul Grooves.
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