Daniel Savio – Hip Hop
FFLP39 // DANIEL SAVIO – HIP HOP
This album throws you back and forth, whether you’re headnodding or uprocking. From the dubby rolling beats of “Clock” and the adrenaline rush of “T-banenatt” and everything to the left, right and centre of them, this is the rough and smooth jockeying for dominion over your body via your ears.
Cover: Daniel Savio
Mastering: Tor Löwkrantz
Release date: 2021-08-13
Release date (2nd edition): 2021-10-01
Format: Digital and 12″ vinyl (Both edition vinyl sold out!)
“Why is it damn near impossible to break up with hip hop? Because it contains everything. This here is a love letter to hip hoppers everywhere, When Eric B. & Rakim’s sophomore album Follow the Leader dropped, a Swedish journalist summed it up as “this isn’t hip hop, this is science fiction”. With Savio’s disc here, it’s not merely what it says, it’s about what it says. This is meta hip hop, hip hop about hip hop, music to remind us about the future and the promise it still holds. Music that makes you wanna rush forward to rock.” / Nathan Hamelberg
Originally released on vinyl with cover design by Daniel Savio (as in the picture). The second edition of this album have a different cover with hand painted labels, black sticker on white sleeve and comes with printed liner notes from Nathan Hamelberg.
Tracklist:
//1. Husby
//2. Poscadrömmar
//3. Space Records
//4. Grafomania
//5. T-banenatt
//6. Magic Art
7//. Damon och Bebop
8//. Clock
9//. Avsked
Video:
Daniel Savio – Space Records (via Youtube)
Film by Mr Bricks and Daniel Savio
Full bio:
There is a spraycan art in which the artist is forced to be spontaneous. He must paint the subway train facade, concrete wall or other urban canvas with a special technique in such a way that an unnatural or interrupted stroke will destroy the line or mess up the picture. Yeah, that above was Bill Evans likening of Miles’ trumpet to Japanese visual ink art, but I flipped the script, all those words make just as much sense about graff and hip hop as they do about Suiboku-ga and Miles cool jazz. Not biting, you can’t copyright beats nor flow, but using. Just like how beats are used on this here album. Evans words are like a direct precursor to what Tricia Rose – the godmother of hip hop studies – calls flow.
Rose describes all expressions of hip hop – the elements, if you like – as consisting of three core qualities: flow, layering and rupture. So here before you is Hip Hop – flow, layering and rupture – brought to you courtesy of Daniel Savio. I’m blatantly biased in saying how butter this is. I’ve had the honor of deejaying together with him on some five hundred occasions through the years, and problably gone out on the sacred ritual of crate digging even more often. I’m partisan, I hate the indifferent and what you’re about to hear will be devastating to your ear in a way that reanimates the stripped-to-the-core, bare essentials, no nonsense aesthetic of Duke Bootee, John Robie and Kool DJ Herc.
All the elements of hip hop set out to defy laws, dj-ing messes with our time, rhyming with grammar and sentence, graff with the alphabet and breaking, uprocking, popping and locking with the laws of gravity. But the form that takes gotta have flow, layers and rupture. Flow – it takes a certain ability to be able to condense those moments on the one and two when you’re “in the zone” – and recreate it to be felt on banging wax.
You gotta come out fresh, hear the beats lined up, juxtaposed with other deadly discs to create a run of electro carpet bombing, where tyrannical beat monotony on the one hand creates the canvas for layers and ruptures to wreak havoc upon.
This here is all that, segued into a unity over nine shards of drum machine boosted hip hop. Yeah layers – this is literally the sound of some tens of thousands of tons of vinyl sifted through hammered together. Some loop from some a flea market bargain find, I know the process and I’ve seen and heard it again and again and it always comes out dope. It could be anything, a snippet of some Gap Mangione, a tablespoon of street funk, drums from some unknown Jamaican soul cover and I always feel like I’m a peeping Tom watching Andre Manuel and Newcleus on a romantic yet creative date, and it’s all going down in my homies home studio.
Rupture – Hip Hop throws you back and forth, whether you’re headnodding or uprocking. From the dubby rolling beats of “Zuzu” and the adrenaline rush of “Tbane-natt” and everything to the left, right and centre of them, this is the rough and smooth jockeying for dominion over your body via your ears. I got to know “Kool DJ Dust” in the mid-nineties when both of us where some ten years into our love affair with hip hop, when he was an intern at the legendary Snickars Records store, and two out of three times we ventured from there in the early years it would be to hit the crates or to play the latest digs out loud.
This was around the time the “Dusty Fingers” comps came out, and boy, Dust sure dug through more dust more than most. Here it shows. And that’s where the layers come from, trial and error, intuition, assembly, collage, mixing, cutting, scratching and jugglin’. About Trans Europe Express, Bam used to say that “the record mixes itself”. Well, Hip Hop mixes itself, it’s all those layers cut and mixed together. It’s a master record. This b-boy document coulda been called so many things, 10 000 leagues on the Streets”, “A life by the crates” or just plain any attempt to encapsulate a life within our vibrant culture, but nothing could be more fundamental than simply “Hip Hop” because that covers it all.
If anything, hip hop always represents something. Here hip hop represents the Stockholm hood Husby, making something out of nothing, assembling opposites to a whole, life on the streets and the ethics and aesthetics of a b-boy from the vantage point of life after youth.
The names of the tunes paint a join- the-dots image of the cultural geography of Stockholm’s hip hop scene circa 1985, if you don’t know you betta ax somebody; “Husby” is one of the Northernmost hoods of the city and home to so much rap muzik culture, “Poscadrömmar” are the itchy dreams to scratch with color that graffiti gave us whay back when, “Space Records” was an oasis downtown where the legendary sound could be found, “Clock” was the burger joint where us hip hop kids up to no good would be loitering waiting to set ish off, “Damon & Bebop” those are the names our local heroes showcasing style. And so on, and so forth.
All this took place in the immediate moments after the big bang impact hip hop culture had on Stockholm, the reverberations of which can still be felt and basically still informs all that which is fresh here. Why is it damn near impossible to break up with hip hop? Because it contains everything. This here is a love letter to hip hoppers everywhere, When Eric B. & Rakim’s sophomore album Follow the Leader dropped, a Swedish journalist summed it up as “this isn’t hip hop, this is science fiction”. With Savio’s disc here, it’s not merely what it says, it’s about what it says. This is meta hip hop, hip hop about hip hop, music to remind us about the future and the promise it still holds. Music that makes you wanna rush forward to rock.
/Nathan Hamelberg
