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Battles: "White Electric (Shabazz Palaces remix)"
From Dross Glop 2 (Warp; 2012)

It’s fitting that Battles would pick Shabazz Palaces to be part of their Dross Glop remix series. The two see eye-to-eye more than your average math rockers and Grammy-winning hip-hop artists do, both showing fondness for a sort of space-age tribal futurism, the comfort between beat and rapper obvious the instant this track starts.

Ish Butler frequently raps about modern man’s inseparable ties to his tribal beginnings and then even further to his instinctual needs, and he transliterates this movement from man as competitor to man as king of the animal world with the slow deconstruction of Battles’ neurotic, neo-tribalistic pace. In it you can feel the shift from mankind as survivalist into Sisyphus, fat with culture and ennui, the species slowed to a crawl much like Battles’ guitars. Bringing to mind his oxymoronic “[I’m] free to chain my will onto the wings of my instinct” from “Free Press and Curl,” Ish fluctuates between lines like “Reaganomics, Bushonomics, Obamanomics / Doesn’t matter / You can find me on the black market” and “Niggas, g- g- g-, get yours.” The aforementioned systems that “[don’t] matter” running on basically the same motivations, meaning that once again he’s stuck: “To make, consume, to catch the stuff that holds me down / To capture my desires, fashion out of this a crown,” having to deal with these same troubles even in someone else’s sonic universe.

But perhaps this isn’t as much a source of existential dread as it may seem on the surface simply because this Battles remix sounds like a Shabazz Palaces track, full stop. Like much of Black Up (2011) it is split into multiple linear suites, its closest relative being standout “Are you… Can you… Were you? (Felt).” Both that track and “White Electric” have a mantra—the former’s about “a feeling,” the latter’s split upon the two different suites it contains, “the words” and “Battles.” While most listeners will wish that Ish rapped past the midway point of this song, he seems to want to symbolically represent the source of these instrumental samples, to show how short the distance is between them. Judging by how well it works here, let’s hope this isn’t the last time the paths of these two artists cross.

Brian Riewer | 02/28/2012 |                

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