Dälek - Asphalt for Eden

I've got a few Dälek albums and would definitely buy more if I ever saw them in shops. In fact, all four Dälek albums I have are because I stumbled across them in record shops, and every single time I've seen a Dälek record in a shop I've bought it, so I guess I'm doing a reasonable job. Despite it sitting fairly far from the usual fare that Truck Store in Oxford stock, they've had the last two Dälek albums in stock when they came out, and I bought both. This is the former of those two.

As I mentioned before, Dälek play a very distinctive style of hip-hop, one that I enjoy in a number of ways - it's very dark and often minimal, but shares ideas with post-rock in how a song should grow and subtly work to overcome you, rather than relying on verse-chorus-verse. The rapping is key, but mostly as an instrument more than as words - half the time you'd be pushed to pinpoint exactly what he's saying. Masked Laughter (Nothing's Left) is a highlight - musically it reminds me of some of the soundscapes that Frank Delgado adds to Deftones, and the rapping is at the exact right point in the mix - lower than the music, but still loud enough to do justify to the fact that MC Dälek is rapping with far more vigour than usual. It Just Is finishes the album with the same energy.

At seven songs and just under 40-minutes, it's a good deal shorter than Abandoned Language and Endangered Philosophies, but these days I'm increasingly thinking that 40-minutes is the right length for an album and, to be honest, the fewer songs in that time, the more likely they are to appeal to my post-rock leanings. I have no idea if they have one album that everyone agrees is their best, but if I was recommending Dälek to anyone, of the four records I know, this would be the starting point I'd suggest.

Format: 12", picture sleeve

Tracks: 7

Cost: £16 new

Bought: Truck Store, Oxford

When: 09/06/16

Colour: Black

Etching: none

mp3s: Download code

Dälek - Untitled

I got in Dälek through a method that has steered me pretty well on a number of occasions - I heard the name of a band playing All Tomorrow's Parties, stumbled across an album of theirs in a record shop and bought it without hearing it. I forget which ATP Dalek were due to play, but around the same time I found a second-hand copy of Abandoned Language for £5 in Kelly's Records (I think it was £7 per cd, or three for £15, so I also got Distillers and Múm cds. Another great bargain that day was the fact they'd mistaken Shellac's Terraform as being a single, so it was a mere £3).

Anyway, I quite enjoyed Abandoned Language. Dälek's take on hip-hop is very different to anything else I've heard; musically there's elements of industrial, drone, showgaze and minimal, and vocally it's rarely possible to hear a single word that MC Dälek is saying, but it all works so well together. It makes for a very hypnotic sound.

Independently, I'd also discovered how awesome Southern Records' Latitudes Sessions were having been introduced through an excellent William Elliott Whitmore EP and later getting sessions by Gowns and A Storm of Light. I'd seen on the internet that Dälek had done a session and was intrigued by the fact it was a single 40-minute long song. Whilst record shopping in Manchester last year I found a copy in Picadilly Records and quickly added it to the stack of records I was buying. I was rather pleased to discover when I got home that it was the limited purple vinyl (/300) rather than the standard black (/700).

The session is exactly what I hoped it would be - similar to the music I'd heard on Abandoned Language but with the extra flexibility/strangeness that comes from not having to think about individual songs. The music definitely flows through movements but in the slow, hypnotic way you'd want. It's more instrumental then not (or maybe that's just how I remember it, given MC Dälek's style of rapping). There's a few minutes on the second side where everything jumps up in intensity and serves to bring you back to consciousness a little. The piece was recorded in a few days around the London bombings in 2005 (the day I moved to Australia) and you can't help but wonder how that is reflected in the music and how it might have sounded otherwise. The insert recommends listening to it with headphones in a darkened room, which isn't something I've tried yet, but I can see it working.

Format: 12", die-cut sleeve, insert
Tracks: 1
Cost: £9.50 new
Bought: Picadilly Records, Manchester
When: 18/05/14
Colour: Transparent purple
Etching: none
mp3s: no