Anticon
2006
Brookland/Oaklyn
About This Album
It's really hardly a surprise that Alias has delved completely into indie electronica/trip-hop. 2005's Lillian, made with his brother Ehren, was practically one ambient soundscape, and Muted, the album that spawned the collaboration between himself and singer Tarsier, was all but void of its Anticon alternative hip-hop connotations. But perhaps that's what Alias is trying to do, anyway: dispel connotations. Yes, he's a hip-hop producer, and yes he's a rapper, but he's also interested in lush, layered atmospheric instrumentals, both organic and synthesized, that blend and contrast with one another like the colors on painter's palette. And what he and Tarsier do on Brookland/Oaklyn is exactly that. There aren't so much songs on the record as explorations of movement, thought, and mood. Keyboards come together with distorted guitars, muddy trip-hop beats meet violins. Tarsier's voice, which often takes a kind of Björk-like haunt, fits smoothly with the tracks that Alias has laid down. It's often clear and smooth, alluding to loneliness and regret, but Alias as producer doesn't hesitate to distort and echo the vocals, putting the singer in the bottom of a well, at the end of a long telephone line, or deep under the earth in a large cave.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,4 and 9)

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