Arkateks

Hello all! Allow me to disturb your reverie as you bask in the gentle cooing of Antony and Bon Iver (which one sounds more like a wounded pigeon, do you think?) to offer to you some really grimy East Coast hip hop no one’s ever heard of. Sound good?

Meet The Arkateks. I’ve never heard of them. More unsettlingly, neither has Google. Apparently, they were a NY crew that existed in the mid-to-late-90s for about a minute. This album represents everything they ever did. It’s called Building the Ark: The Progression Sessions, and I downloaded it when it came into eMusic a month or so ago, because the album’s name gave it a vague sense of historical importance. I don’t know if any real hip hop “heads” know about the Arkateks out there (I am mainfestly not one of these) but this record, in the greatest eMusic sense, seems to have dropped out of the sky on some The Gods Must Be Crazy shit.

I don’t know who the producer is. But the beats on this record are so “grimy/raw/dirty/insert-rap-cliche-here” that the tapes actually sound they might have been buried in dirt for the last ten years. They are standard East Coast cinema-strings headknock beats, with the sort of artfully damaged-sounding drum loops that pretty much define the sound of “boom-bap.” The rappers on it spit roughneck NY stuff, coming off like some hybrid of Method Man and Havoc, and they sound amazing. Indeed, these songs end up sounding almost exactly what I imagine the demo tapes for The Infamous sounded like. If you are one of eMusic’s hip hop heads, this is must-have.

That’s all. (Oh, and relax, I love the new Antony. The new Bon Iver, I feel about the same as always. I dig his “O Superman” moment though).