Kaytranada - 99.9%

Pitchfork 80

There’s a particularly touching moment in a recent FADER profile of the Montreal-based producer Kaytranada. Kay, whose real name is Louis Kevin Celestin, moved from Haiti to Canada with his family when he was an infant, and his father retains a strong sense of national pride. When Kaytranada plays his dad a song from his debut album, 99.9%, the music sparks a rush of patriotic excitement. “Now I understand that he didn’t forget Haiti!” his father exclaims. “You can feel it!”

It’s possible to guess at the characteristics Kay’s father had in mind. Among Haitian music’s distinct features is an insistent focus on complex rhythms, many of them imported from African music and Dominican merengue, as well as a more general willingness to incorporate various countries’ homegrown styles into a cohesive whole. The genre-defying stew of funk, soul, R&B, and beat and dance music that Kaytranada has cooked up on 99.9% nods back at that heritage of percussion-driven synthesis.

Kay first made his name as a Soundcloud standout and dance DJ, but he has the mentality of a musico-archaeologist, digging past yesterday’s obvious pop gems to unearth the overlooked. In its sonic diversity, his album is reminiscent of Madlib’s crate-digging dynamism, but unlike a lot of instrumental hip-hop (or the house artists he’s sometimes grouped with), Kay’s beats are not at all rigid or predictable. His drums are configured strangely, bending, shifting, doubling back. With those rhythms, and his own custom-made synths, the 23-year-old shows himself to be a strong-willed studio auteur on a mix of instrumental and lyric-based tracks.

Several standout drummers were recruited for the record, including Karriem Riggins and Alexander Sowinski of the Toronto jazz outfit BADBADNOTGOOD, but even the tracks that don’t feature a guest percussionist are studded with polyrhythms. The chillwave synths that kick off the album opener, “Track Uno,” prop up restless rhythms that morph several times throughout the song. They drive it forward into the Riggins feature “Bus Ride,” and the momentum never lets up.

Kay’s inventive percussion keeps the album upbeat, but it’s often a dreamy, mellow listen, perhaps a result of the producer’s effort to broaden perceptions of his capabilities. Many of the featured collaborators, including Phonte, Syd, and Anderson .Paak, are hip-hop adjacent artists who have refused to be constrained by the dogmas of the genre, something that seems to have inspired Kay. Syd and Phonte in particular, have helped to define a contemporary, melodic take on funk, combining soul, R&B, and a dash of electronica. Their features, “One Too Many” and “You’re the One,” on which Kay showcases his love for warmly shimmering synths, are two of the album’s strongest.

Only four of the album’s fifteen tracks do not feature a guest, but even without any company, Kaytranada displays plenty of range. His most impressive solo cut is “Lite Spots,” a rework of the Brazilian singer Gal Costa’s 1973 track, “Pontos De Luz.” Kay takes advantage of the abrupt shifts in tempo in Costa’s original vocal, assembling a circle of handclaps and other percussive quirks to maximize the song’s potential as a house party special.

Even on his collaborations with more traditional hip-hop and R&B artists, Kaytranada rarely reaches for the radio, avoiding formulaic structures. His track with AlunaGeorge, “Together,” is almost all hook, with an energized central verse from the D.C. rapper GoldLink. On the Vic Mensa feature, “Drive Me Crazy,” the outro takes up almost half the track’s running time. It’s long been clear that Kay thinks of vocals as just another musical element, which helps him to make even the most unmemorable guest performances function as dependable instruments. (Also clear: his lack of interest in lyrics, the only generic aspect of 99.9%, and the one element that doesn’t bear traces of his close attention.)

There are two other features on 99.9% that should not escape mention. Anderson .Paak’s contribution, “Glowed Up,” is a two-part suite that make use of the Oxnard artist’s skills as a rapper and a singer respectively, emphasizing just how much Kay can accomplish with a similarly creative collaborator. The other is extra-musical: The album’s cover, painted by the globetrotting Spanish artist Ricardo Cavolo, is warm, colorful and psychedelic, as perfect a match for the record’s sound as any of its tracks. (Cavolo also contributed animated sketches for each track, which can be found on Instagram.)

Kaytranada picked Cavolo out personally, of course, just one more example of his painstaking focus on nearly every detail. Though his credentials are those of an artist who came of age in a digital era, his album is replete with the qualities that we associate with the analogue. It echoes the warm, melodic funk of golden-era Stevie Wonder far more closely than, say, the flatscreen sheen of Drake’s VIEWS, revealing the increasing uselessness of the word “digital” as a descriptor. There’s certainly nothing programmed about Kaytranada’s approach. His record’s name is meant to suggest a certain sense of incompleteness, but it’s one of the most well-edited, coherent debuts to emerge in recent memory.