Shabazz Palaces

Shabazz Palaces is the duo of Ishmael Butler and Tendai Maraire (although they describe themselves as a collective) from Seattle. I’d heard Shabazz Palaces before, without realising, on a mixtape that I obsessed with for a month or two a few years back. So it was a pleasant surprise when I belatedly picked up their 2011 album ‘Black Up’ and heard ‘Yeah You’ (which had been on the mixtape). I was even more pleased to find out they’d be playing at XOYO London. I heard someone once describe their music as ‘dystopian rap’, which sounds about right. It’s driving and brooding, and has drawn comparisons with Odd Future and Flying Lotus, which is perhaps the right ballpark but Shabazz Palaces has more of a dubstep starkness about it. Anway, given the production on ‘Black Up’ I was wondering how they’d recreate that live and how much of it would be already canned. Maraire was stood behind a set of congas and part of a drum kit, as well as a drum machine set up on a table, and switched between them as well as singing backing vocals. He also played the mbira, an african thumb piano which is featured on ‘Black Up’. Butler was electric, a seasoned frontman, who from behind his rig of laptop, drum machine and effects units delivered ‘Swerve…’, ‘free press and curl’, ‘Youology’, along with a few cuts from their earlier EPs. There was none of this “put your hands in the air” nonsense, it was just the pure dark energy of the music keeping everyone moving.

Stas is the Seattle sound NOW. Si’ahl. Water. Hip hop. Smokey on the water
She is very very very Dope. Imbibe her Arts. Look. Listen. S’women. Voices. Seathle. Been sleepy?... wakes. Wake. Bake. Wakes in This Lake. She’s bad. She makes me laugh sometimes.
Excitement for psychedelic beauty out of pacific northwest. Don’t sleep through it.
Wise Women.
Hip hop
Art