From my experience, I’ve learned that BBQ is a very reliable sauce. It’s new post time!

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Good Morning! I am Jacob Braybrooke and, just like always, I’m typing up about your daily track on the blog, because it’s always my day-to-day pleasure to write up about a different piece of music every day! If you have not heard of Marlowe before, this is a collaborative alternative rap project comprised from the duo of L’Orange, a Seattle-based producer, and Solemn Brigham, a rapper and lyricist based in North Carolina. L’Orange’s quickfire vinyl samples and experimental electronic beats conjoin with Brigham’s vocals, concerning social commentary and global poverty, to mark a neo-psychedelic take on the more old-fashioned, melodic Hip-Hop sounds that were being explored by the likes of A Tribe Called Quest and Public Enemy in the late-1980’s. This is still a rather green act, with the duo making their debut just two years ago with “Marlowe”, a self-titled album, which was released in July 2018. A full two years later, L’Orange and Solemn Brigham are now back with “Marlowe 2”, the direct sequel and follow-up to their self-titled album, which was released on August 7th, via Mello Music Group. Let’s take a gander to the sampler, “Future Power Sources”, below.

Looking to underground icon DJ Trackstar (the DJ and engineer for Run The Jewels) to help them co-produce the new track, “Future Power Sources” sees Solemn Brigham spin a surrealist spoken word rap about self-development, personal growth and reflective maturation over the top of an ever-flowing, scratched Industrial electronic beat that provides a zany and kinetic flow to the methodical, classic hip-hop sound being produced overall by the duo. It creates an authoritative and left-field backdrop to the evolving soundscape, and L’Orange fills the track with quick clips and fast samples to add a witty undertone to Brigham’s more serious vocals, while the latter recites: “Brand new day, put your face on” and “Better find another model/I’ve been holding on the bottle, like a new dad” at a breakneck speed. In fact, the vocals never really slow, except for the brief interval near the end, as Brigham concludes “I been putting up my hands, I just want to be Sovereign, but I’m still trying to get up, in the heart of it” and “Everything that I’m looking for, a part of me” with a gliding quality over L’Orange’s rapid and accurate sample work. There is a lot going on here within the space of three minutes, but I feel as though the melodic structure of the track seems repetitious enough and the lyricism is clear cut-enough for audiences to understand relatively lightly. It sounds as though a lot of effort has obviously gone into each of the sample clearances, the licensing needed to obtain the numerous quick clips used for this track, to help them re-purpose the futuristic and whimsical qualities they wanted to obtain for the track. Overall, I think it’s one of the strongest hip-hop releases of the last few months, and it pays off nicely, with an exciting sound.

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Thank you very much for reading my new post! As promised, I’ll be back tomorrow, and we’ll be switching gears with an in-depth look at a new track from earlier in the year, that I’ve been meaning to cover on the blog since then, but never quite had the time to. It comes from a Chilean-American ambient/classical electronic music composer who has Palestinian ancestry from Bethlehem. He is perhaps most notable for releasing a large volume of experimental recordings for his independent label, Other People. It includes a five-hour improvisational live performance concert at MoMA PS1 in 2012, and the release of two full albums this year. If you really liked what you just read, why not follow the blog to get notified when every new daily post is up and why not like the Facebook page here?: https://www.facebook.com/OneTrackAtATime/