DJ Paypal - Sold Out
Tiny Mix Tapes 80
DJ Paypal
Sold Out
Rating:
Before his tragic death in 2014, it seemed likely that DJ Rashad was destined to become the “face” of footwork. Even though he came up at a time when many other juke DJs were getting similar exposure, even when he was appearing side-by-side with these artists on comps or in collabs, there was something about his work in particular that got people talking. Maybe it was just the perfect time and place for him to appear, maybe it was that on super-lean, hyper-catchy tracks like “CCP” and ”iPod” you could hear the 10,000 hours of practice paying off. Personally, I thought the defining characteristic that brought Rashad so much attention was that he was already favoring a kind of “post-” mentality when we (the wider music public/music critics) found him, that he had already begun to explore the genre’s cerebral aspects and new song forms while many of his peers were still caught up in the visceral stunt of putting a groove-breaking triplet on one. When Double Cup dropped, Rashad’s intuitive grasp of footwork and juke rhythms had been abstracted to a template, an ideology of flexible sound. Hybrid experiments like “Acid Bit” and “Im Too Hi” didn’t just work, they made crucial arguments for footwork’s next step: subsuming other subgenres into its ethos. To be sure, a bit of its actual instrumentation would remain (the poppy snares, the thin hi-hats), but more importantly, the focus was on filling songs with little moments, stunts strung together in a tight routine of pure style.
Similarly, DJ Paypal — an anonymous producer who plays with a shirt over his face at every show, runs Mall Music Inc. and markets irony better than anyone in the game — wants to say several things with footwork that haven’t been said yet. His Drake Edits and the Buy Now EP were good examples of how the frantic, fast-forward-to-the-best-part aesthetic of footwork could basically transform anything, from commercial rap to Afrobeat to chipmunk disco, into a narcotic hit of beatwork. With Sold Out, though (a double EP but really an album’s worth of material), the artist overflows with ideas for new directions in the genre. From the ecstatic vocal chant of the title track, heralding some great big parade of dancers from the heavens, to the explosive closer “Say Goodbye,” this record bangs and really works, combining footwork’s stunting, confounding rhythms with irreverent confidence, a bevy of different tricks and masterful sample mixing.
While “Sold Out” is a great opener in terms of exposition — the jazzy drum chops, the stilted but beautiful samples, elated harmony and counterpoint — the album really launches with “Ahhhhhhh,” a chopped-up, twice-flipped soul groove that vacillates between mid- and hi-tempo in effortless logic leaps, no doubt the product of painstaking editing; the song doesn’t spare a second between its well-planned beats. “Slim Trak” further amplifies things from here, squashing an Afrobeat sample into a greasy ooze with constant sidechaining and double delays — a crowd favorite. “Awakening” seems like the most traditional footwork song, in that it is the most repetitive and stunted of the songs on Sold Out, four minutes of drum workout underpinned by comical, nasal blips of sax and trumpet. But like every other song on the record, the track has been carefully sculpted into a perfect earworm, each new pattern and configuration a slick new compact joy. The latter half of the record is more of a curveball, with collaborations between footwork DJs and a few strange others: slicing soul samples with DJ Earl on “We Finally Made It” into a minor anthem, stadium style; getting high and funky on “On A Cloud” with vocoder and whistles; and “Say Goodbye,” which features Keiska and PC Music producer Tielsie in a romantic, vaporwave-tinged arrangement that eventually catapults itself into straight-up EDM supersaturation.
Ultimately, Sold Out is not doing what its title cheekily alludes to. Although it traverses a variety of genres outside of footwork’s typical territory, DJ Paypal never relents on the actual practice of the juke: the core sound of the beat, getting danced on. He blends an irreverence to footwork’s typically minimal trappings with an adherence to its mind-bending meandering, cutting big-budget and indie productions alike into an ecstatic dance collage. This record exists as more proof that footwork’s capabilities are only barely explored. New possibilities run amok all over the beat in 2015. Footwork’s once-startling, once-coaching technique, the elusive change-up trip-a-let, can now be absorbed into public knowledge along with Amen breaks and the oonce oonce. We get it now — we accept that in footwork a song’s momentum will be split endlessly, that its arc will be sacrificed for instant gratification. In these narrow performance spaces, we can hear the artists plan their routines and get a sense of their style: Spinn’s off that loud. Diamond reps his clique. Jlin has dark energies to master. Rashad didn’t give a fuck. DJ Paypal sits atop the braintree, dropping ideas.
01. Sold Out
02. Ahhhhhhh
03. Slim Trak
04. Awakening
05. We Finally Made It (feat. DJ Earl)
06. With Uuuuuuu (feat. Feloneezy & Jackie Dagger)
07. On A Cloud (feat. Nangdo & DJ Taye)
08. Say Goodbye (feat. Kieska & Tielsie)
Pitchfork 79
Footwork producer DJ Paypal doesn't appear on the surface to be the type of artist that treats his influences with any sort of mindfulness. From his trollish stage name to the plainly ironic bite of Pen and Pixel's distinctive, lens-flare-heavy aesthetic on the cover of his new mini-LP Sold Out, he reads on first glance like just another node on Internet Art's massive recombination engine, which endlessly churns out kitschy (and occasionally brilliant) assemblages of random late-capitalist pop-cultural detritus.There's also the matter of the style he's working in: footwork is a particularly holistic musical form that until very recently has been virtually inseparable not only from the dance style that it soundtracks, but also from the brutally segregated, impoverished black neighborhoods on Chicago's South and West Sides where it was born.
It's a minor revelation to find out that Paypal's far more sincere than his image would suggest. The way that the drums on Sold Out's titular opening track pulse in and out of focus is an expert move well out of reach of the average SoundCloud dilettante, and throughout the album he displays the kind of rule-bending that only comes from closely studying the rules first. "A lot of kids hear like five tracks and start making footwork, and that’s not respectful," he told Pitchfork recently. It's clear from his music that he has listened to thousands and absorbed them into his DNA. And not only does he make incredibly good footwork, he's also helping to clear a path for its future evolution.
Paypal's a member of the L.A.-born Brainfeeder coalition of artists representing a certain organic, jazz-indebted segment of bass music experimentalists, and like most of the best material to come out of the Brainfeeder camp, it reconnects beat-based music with styles of pre-digital black music whose more radical avant-garde aspects have been forgotten over the years, or dulled by overfamiliarity—bebop, free jazz, and especially the synthesizer-crazed soul and fusion artists of the '70s.
"Ahhhhhhh" combines blissed-out piano riffs, pitched up vocal harmonies, and a burbling bassline. "With Uuuuuuu" and "On a Cloud" teasingly reference early synth-funk (the latter with a vocoder part that Paypal and coproducers Nangdo and DJ Taye blend into a crisp solo trumpet). Other parts of the record reach even further out—"Slim Trak" folds in Brazilian samba drumming, while "Say Goodbye" (featuring Keiska and Tielsie), drifts into a stoned-genius hybrid of dream pop and J-pop that's easily compelling enough to sustain an entire LP.
At the same time, Paypal's also a member of Chicago's venerable footwork music crew Teklife, and his tracks never lose sight of the style's more utilitarian roots scoring YouTube footworking videos and high school hallway dance battles. The old slogan that "music wants to be free" is a truer fit for remix culture than the music piracy advocates that coined it. There's a point in the life cycle of every musical style where it has to expand its worldview and open itself up to new participants and new influences, or else it stagnates and withers away. No artist needs to ask permission to borrow an influence, and with so much music available and making it becoming so cheap, it's not even a requirement that you dive more than surface deep into a style before you borrow it. But Sold Out shows what a difference it can make when you hold yourself to a higher standard.
Fri May 27 00:00:00 GMT 2016The Quietus 0
Given that he's the kind of guy who releases 30 Drake remixes at a time, opens sets with Mario Kart themes and drapes a t-shirt over his face when he performs, DJ Paypal must have seemed like a match made in heaven for the Flying Lotus-helmed Brainfeeder label. The part-musician, part-troll has spent the last decade or so helping Teklife (the loose assembly of footwork producers and performers that emerged from the early 00s Chicago ice-rink dance fight scene) rise to international prominence, while simultaneously building an alluring individual presence of utter anonymity on the internet. On his marginally ironically titled debut Sold Out, Paypal continues to operate as both an individual and part of the wider global movement of footwork. The first four tracks show off the mysterious Berliner's auteurish mixing abilities alone, while the second half of the album sees him open up the studio to longtime collaborators such as Teklife's DJ Earl and Taye.
This combination gives Sold Out the impression of throwing a happy nod to the scene that spawned it while keeping its gaze firmly fixed on the future of the genre. Like DJ Spinn and the sadly deceased Rashad before him, Paypal is adept at tractor-beaming the disparate genres of soul, jazz and disco into the accelerated house core and bending them into evermore strange and beguiling shapes. Perhaps the most breathtaking of these moments comes early on 'Ahhhhhh', which begins with the kind of laid back lounge you might find in the foyer of a particularly glitzy Las Vegas hotel, complete with blissed-out piano and soft horns. Then DJ Paypal takes a wrench to the track, pummelling these bare bones into an 100mph glitch-hop mindfuck that sets the scene for frenetic swerving in style that defines the rest of the album.
His veiled identity, combined with the album's constant attempts to pull the rug from under the listener's feet, combine to give DJ Paypal the image of a particularly mischievous spirit. He's the Pan of electronica, the Caliban of disco, the footwork Peeves – flitting between the desire to enchant and the compulsion to terrify. 'Slim Trak' is definitely an occasion where the latter of these two aims trumps the former. Its smattering of disembodied, unintelligible voices provides the listener with the unsettling impression that the track is chasing them, toying with its food like a hungry ghoul. Shades of The Herbaliser's Something Wicked This Way Comes abound, and the sensation that there's some kind of malevolent presence woven through the eight songs that make up Sold Out never fully escapes you.
Part of what sets teeth on edge while listening to the album is DJ Paypal's knack for a scattershot beat. His drum loops rarely repeat themselves the same way, clicking and shifting like a swarm of eager scorpions. At times this overpowers the surrounding synth swells and guest spots, and often what starts as footwork music ends up sounding more like tap. Even on the album's most (aka only) subdued moment, luscious closer 'Say Goodbye', the snare clatter never truly subsides. But that's just the Teklife mindset; at least no-one can say that Paypal ever forgets to make music that will make your feet work for it. And, overall, the album's main failing is actually its brevity. Whoever DJ PayPal is, he's clearly got some time management issues if he can remix three times as many Drake tracks as there are songs on his debut album.
Share this article:
Fri May 27 00:00:00 GMT 2016