yOU ARE PRIVY TO SUPER SECRET INFORMATION. wE STAND AT THE CUSP OF A NEW STRAIN OF DOUBT. a LITTLE BADLY NEEDED DELIRIUM TREMENS. tHE SOUND OF NOMORROW. DINKA DINKA DINKA. i PRONOUNCE THIS THE DAWN OF NOFUNK. NODRUNK. NOCRUNK. NOSTOP. N-O-H-O-P. WE ARE NOT THE BEACH BOYS. WE ARE NOT THE BEASTIE BOYS. WE ARE NOT WILCO. WE ARE DERIVITIVE
------"Northern New Jersey must be a downer, to judge from this first dispatch from Emoo Records. The project name is humble, and the album title is limp (although both turn out to be misnomers), and the opening track is based around a sample saying 'everybody's dead' . New Jersey has obviously undergone a change of heart since the carefree days of Sugarhill Records. The funk in here is internalised, nagging, paranoid.
Although Salad is built from MPC sampler, turntables and muttered raps, the 'hiphop' label, like the music itself, turns out to be rather nebulous. The 12 minute 'The Hello I've Come To Kill You Series' most closely recalls Bark Psychosis's 'Scum', Crescent's Electronis Sound Constructions, or even Flies Inside The Sun- post-rock in its loosest, rawest form, with jazzy brushed percussion, lurking feedback and guitar melodies that wander so far they drop off the map. Salad extracts the core of hiphop and fills out the edges with hazy, impressionistic blur of echo treatments and low end hum. The loose raps are echo drenched and, like a Jack Kerouac recording, somehow self-indulgent and utterly compelling at the same time, a navel gazed at in sheer desperation.
Save for the brief electric scratch and strut of 'Transmission From Planet E', Salad is too smoked out to bother with any sharp moves. But while much recent underground rap aligns itself with the pummelling punishment and joyless severity of the worst hardcore punk, Derivitive push even deeper, with bleak urban reportage more akin to the dispatches of early Cabaret Voltaire or Throbbing Gristle- Intriguingly, the clandestine recordings here are already period pieces, dating from 1999-2002"-----THE WIRE-March 2006BAKON DRAVEN EP1:9
