Rhythm & Sound

Someone I know says she doesn’t like reggae because she feels like it sucks the soul out of her. It’s difficult to picture how such a view could be applied to the happier, more optimistic side of the music. However, I think I know what she means about the darker stuff. And it doesn’t get much darker than the hybrid techno/reggae propagated by Rhythm & Sound. Their music conveys an image of the soul as a dark, tarry substance that’s both rich as deep, loamy soil and strange as the imprint of half-glimpsed spirits. On Showcase (1998), Tikiman aka Paul St Hilaire drifts over the beats like a human vessel slipped from its corporeal moorings. Below him beats echo lugubriously in vast, foggy spaces, their progress as patient and unstoppable as the years. Structure is paired back to the bone, even sinew and musculature are stripped away. Rhythm & Sound (2001) becomes more ethereal. Only one piece features Hilaire, while the rest float free from their restraints in a way not dissimilar from the singer on its predecessor. The final piece, Imprint, is a monstrous piece of remorseless hypnosis whose nearly 17 minute duration is both momentary and seemingly eternal. Rhythm & Sound With The Artists and The Versions (2003) integrates the eight guest vocalists more seamlessly than their predecessors, veering the closest that Mark Ernestus and Moritz von Oswald have come to songform. The CD covers are the second and third ones above – the Versions one wipes the identity of the singers away with a horizontal blur, a visual harbinger of the saturated undertow of the music.

What else could the label that releases this music be called, but Burial Mix? Now that I’ve stopped buying music – at least until I get another job – perhaps Santa’s elves will drop a copy of 2005′s See-Mi-Yah down the chimney. If I were rolling in money I’d also want the rather gorgeous box of 7″ singles – even though I don’t have a record player! such is my acquisitive daftness… My favourite place to listen to this music is definitely in the car, turned up very loud, so that the whole vehicle throbs. Rhythm & Sound’s music is body, is breathing armature. And it has to be night-time, the later the better – at that point when headlights blur ever so slightly as though one’s eyelid/shutter were allowing the reduced light to scan onto the retina for just a little too long. Oh and the methodical pace of the music makes me drive more slowly, which is undoubtedly a good thing. I’m going out tonight to catch Wibutee at the Spitz and I’m looking forward to the drive…

MP3: Rhythm & Sound / Ruff Way (Version)