Filled with sampled ephemera and vintage television clips, the rapper’s latest EP looks to science fiction for a pessimistic, paranoid vision of the present.
There’s little information readily available on Infinite Aziz, the rapper and producer behind Lost Navigator. His new EP is an astral mix of jazz and rap that feels like it came from nowhere, a flowing mix of sampled bits of movies and television shows interspersed with songs that feels like tuning in to a radio channel from an undiscovered planet. A cryptic description on its Bandcamp page reveals its ethos: “The understanding of the lost navigator is that yes, he or she can be mocked for being lost. However, the irony is that the mocker does not realize that the navigator is traveling while they are simply mocking in place.” Aziz is willing to take risks to end up somewhere new, and for most of the EP they pay off.
Opener “Ann” begins with a sample of a television announcer explaining what rap is (“A music that is all beat—strong beat and talk”) and proceeds to offer Aziz’s vision of what rap should be. Not content merely to sample the Arsenio Hall Show theme music, he bookends the song with a snippet of an interview with Hall. Between these throwbacks, he raps over a collage of voices and a piano loop. People can be heard speaking in the background as Aziz throws out pearls of wisdom: “You fight life/Embrace death, you got it backwards kid.” It’s disconcerting yet engaging, like watching someone make themselves heard over a busy open-mic night.
This sense of a lone voice through a storm is enhanced by the production, which manages to be frenetic and melodic at once. A whirring noise reverberates throughout “Grace Race,” as if Aziz is being carried off by a rocket. As he lays down alarmist bars about alien races (“Stockpiling our melanin for their trip to the heavens”) and state oppression (“We charged up but misdirected/My nephew facing 50 for some bullshit, please bless him”) on “The Gambler,” satellite beeps punctuate the march of the drums, lending a ringing menace to his paranoia. You get the feeling that Lost Navigator’s narrator has just watched a program that interspersed the horrors of American history with the wildest sci-fi, and he now finds it impossible to tell the difference between what was real and what was imagined.
By embracing this chaotic mode of interpretation, Aziz comes to revelations impossible to reach any other way. On “Really Out There,” he speaks in metaphor over a hazy fog of what sounds like slowed-down ECM jazz, musing out loud about the worst possible results of mass uprising: “You really think the Death Star won’t collide with Earth?” he raps, sounding incredulous. Mass extinction seems more plausible to him than true equality. Over the piercing organ notes of the Goblin-sounding “Magnetic,” he gets as close to upfront as he can: “Violence saturates everyday life/We getting numb to that/These orchestrations all being funded so that they don’t collapse.”
You leave Lost Navigator feeling dejected, yet informed. Aziz’s vision is bleak but difficult to fully reject. Surrounding his pessimistic missives with ’80s ephemera and science-fiction scenarios is his way of adding noise to the signal, making real the conflict inherent in his content. How much can you change in a world that continually falsifies who you are? On Lost Navigator, Aziz proves that you may have to glide far out into space in order to see earthly problems with clarity.
0 comments:
Post a Comment