Over time I’ve posted about many an instrumental Hip-Hop album in this space. I’ve also given intermittent props to instrumental artists of other genre persuasions as well. And a handful of times I’ve even posted about artists whose music is mostly instrumental, but not wholly.
I don’t currently have a single recently released instrumental Hip-Hop album in my possession which I haven’t already dug sufficiently enough to warrant a Blogarhythms post. And I’m feeling particularly un-robot these days which sort of discounts the stack of largely instrumental Dance records I have sitting around my office. So, what’s left to sate my desire for not-quite-lyrical listening then? Well, lately I’ve been dipping into the lite-on-the-lyricism music of a pair of French musicians who go by the macabre sobriquet Zombie Zombie and a Middletown, Connecticut-based husband-and-wife duo whose adopted moniker, Paper, is decidedly more mundane.
With an array of synthesizers listed in their instrumental arsenal I was originally expecting Zombie Zombie to be pupils in good standing at the Ed Banger school of Electro-House. But that’s not really the case at all. No, the music on their debut disc A Land for Renegades, while largely electronic-based and sometimes uptempo, bears more in common with some proggy Horror or coldly synthetic Sci-Fi movie score, with some hints of Italo-Disco, Krautrock, traditional Electronic Dance Music and Dance-Rock thrown in for good measure. To my ears the album sounds a lot like a lost soundtrack to some non-existent movie about a dystopian future where the Earth has been devastated by a war between cyborgs and zombies who both threaten to take over the entire planet. And although a few tracks feature vocals, they only rarely amount to too much more than an odd chant, an infrequently repeated refrain, or eerie moaning.
Zombie Zombie “I’m Afraid of What’s There”
The couple behind Paper, husband Aaron Snow and wife Adrienne Snow, also have a collection of synthesizers and electronic do-dads at their disposal. And the music they make, which they released under the nearly un-Google-able album title As As, is way more organic than “electro.” Their brand of not-traditionally-structured songcraft is a little more disjointed, experimental even, luxuriating in dreamy Jazz-influenced soundscapes, boundlessly spacey ambient atmospheres, and complex, changeable rhythms & time-signatures. Once again, although a number of tracks support vocals, they’re usually little more than a few chanted or softly sung words here and there. And in many cases they blend into the compositions in a way where they seem more like another instrument in the mix, or the snatches of chatter, ad-libs and effects-soaked remnants of vocals one might hear on a Dub Reggae tune.
Paper “Boy”
While neither of these not-exactly-instrumental releases offer the same sort of head-nodding abandon that the instrumental beats I usually favor might, they’re still great diversions from the norm. Partially because they both depart markedly from the traditions of Pop songwriting and song-structure. But mainly because they allow one to focus almost totally on the atmosphere and the textures of the music and become submerged entirely in the experience of listening.
-El Keter
