Two decades ago, Ishmael “Ish” Butler was weaving heavy boho hip-hop between dusty jazz samples, as one third of Brooklyn’s Digable Planets. The distance between that music and his latest incarnation, as one half of spaced Seattle rap iconoclasts Shabazz Palaces, is roughly equal to that between Miles Davis’s Kind Of Blue and On The Corner. Which is to say, firmly in the direction of far-out.
Tonight, Ish and instrumentalist Tendai Maraire don’t deal much in interplay or banter. For much of the night Shabazz Palaces remain mysterious silhouettes bathed in red and green light, bobbing about in gauzy dry ice as dense as the echo robing Ish’s vocals, labouring with avant invention.
With its disparate vibe and unusual structure – 18 tracks within seven larger suites – new album Lese Majesty is ambitious and challenging; live, Shabazz Palaces redouble that challenge. Their music is minimal at heart, but twisted, and touched by the hand of dub: beats might materialise from a haze of digital snake rattle, warped cymbals and 808 pulse, while glitches and skipped loops are seemingly conjured into rhythms by sheer perverse will.
But Shabazz Palaces aren’t playing at sonic brinkmanship for its own sake – they pull hip-hop’s blueprint to pieces, for sure, but they’re assembling new music from its atomised parts. The carnal, edgy, bass-driven throb of #Cake finds Ish incanting hypnotic mantras, building and building to sound like rave music from Venus, while unexpected hooks writhe within the paranoid Colluding Oligarchs and blissful Noetic Noiromantics.
Chatter at the crowd’s edges suggests not everyone tonight is ready to follow Shabazz Palaces to hip-hop’s outer reaches. Closer to the stage, though – as Ish flows rhymes over some furious sequencer and thumb-piano interplay, stirring up a bristling funk somewhere between Sextant-era Herbie Hancock and Aphex Twin – the group’s fearless frontierism has recruited plenty of hardy cosmonauts with the mettle for their trip.
• On UK tour until 10 November. See Sub Pop for details
