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 dabrye interview
 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.Bleep culture meets street culture. The freshest, most thrilling hip-hop album so far this year has come from the most unexpected of sources. Dabrye is just one of the many aliases of Tadd Mullinix, a 27-year-old electronic producer from the university town of Ann Arbor. His Two/Three – the second in a trilogy, in case you couldn’t guess – captures some of hip-hop’s finest (MF Doom, Vast Aire, AG) spitting over a collection of the most ornery beats this side of grime. Although Mullinix’s other projects all operate in varying spheres of electronic music (he records jungle as SK-1, house as JC Cotton, and “braindance” under his own name) he was determined that his hip hop-manifestation, Dabrye, shouldn’t be seen as some dry academic exercise, which is why Two/Three adds vocals to the mix. “It wasn’t getting out to the right people before,” he says. “I wanted people to be understanding of it as part of the hip-hop movement, not as me masturbatorially joining genres with electronica.” Dabrye cites the early 80s electro scene as evidence of hip-hop’s historical connection with machine-driven music, though his formative years were spent soaking up the legendary Electrifying Mojo radio shows by Jeff Mills (under his own alias, The Wizard). “I was listening to that when I was in elementary school. I wasn’t really aware of what I was listening to at the time, only later. There were a lot of things going on that later went on to be world famous, and I got to hear a lot of DJs spinning a lot of weird records.”  Besides Detroit’s techno deities, Dabrye’s principal hip-hop influence is Jay Dee, the recently deceased producer for Slum Village and a whole lot more, whose bumping rhythms are echoed in tracks like Viewer Discretion. He turns up on the mic for the LP’s closer, Game Over, alongside Phat Kat. Surprisingly though, on an album that features such MC masters as AG and MF Doom, the standout is Special by relative unknown Guilty Simpson, whose hardcore rap combines perfectly with Dabrye’s static firestorm, even though its lyrical content wouldn’t be out of place on a Mobb Deep album. “I didn’t want it to be too backpack,” he explains. “I wanted some street delivery. It’s not important to have someone rhyming about guns, it’s purely sonic, but it’s very important to have an interesting delivery that speaks to the sound of the rhythm, which is a little more urban and funky.”
Steve Yates
Dabrye – Two/Three, released 19 June 06 on Ghostly.
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comment by flyingtwinkle
Jun 16, 2006
holds anxiety yet this album is full of promises,a cultural juggernaut, instead of being cold, building on the boom -hop, relating to the future of hip-hop music.
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