Pillar of the Parisian scene, Emma DJ presents a second album/mixtape for Lee Gamble’s UIQ label, a 28-track reading of Tik Tok-ready rap featuring a brace of naif melodies embellished with emosh autotune and starring Rainy Miller, Shyweek, Simo Cell, Tmongo, Torus, Yves Ciroc, Cambyse, Cxoxc, Elliotrdv, Eugène Blove, Low Jack, Nonoekichii and more.
Back in rap mode after a bout of industrialised grime with L.I.E.S., the prolific producer doubles down on the ‘Godrime’ mixtape for UIQ with a new 72 minute set of acrid, syrupy wooze and strung-out emoting carried by puckered hooks and abundance of gobs on each cut. It’s the sound of smoked-out Parisian bedrooms and backseats, smudging the face of mimetic pop-rap into subtly distorted gurns with a contemporariness reflecting mutant rap’s modern hyper-reality.
Like its predecessor, it avoids the concréte clatter of Emma DJ's L.I.E.S. material and instead focuses on airy, inebriated radio trap - the kind of dilated post-sample culture synthetika that lashes Drain Gang with Lil Uzi Vert and Metro Boomin with PNL. Glued together haphazardly but sculpturally, the tape sounds like a heavily stepped-on snowball of the last decade of post-DatPiff iPhone rap, all emosh supersaws, clipped chop snares and downcast AutoTurnt mumbles. Emma DJ holds it together because he balances a passion for the spidery tendrils of localised rap with a robust connection to the Parisian scene; each additional voice helps him assemble a pixelated picture of inebriated DIY shows, low-NRG afters' and stagger'd walks home thru neon-lit Parisian side streets.
Tracks don't so much stand out as morph and heave, spiralling between familiarity and nescience. At any moment you might be time traveling to an EDM-rap roadbump, or to the cloud rap era that launched A$AP Rocky and Playboi Carti on one side of the Atlantic and Yung Lean and his acolytes on the other. For his part, Emma DJ doesn't seem interested in repeating so much as using this language to help tell a story that's decidedly current. He's sentimental about the sound, that much is clear, but it doesn't stop him from putting his own spin on it. 'SZYGI' is paper-thin and awkwardly psychedelic, like PNL through a broken Bluetooth speaker, while 'HRTBRK' is chipmunked sad croons, 'Marvin's Room' dialtone romance and epic, low-n-slow synth drama. 'JCOMPTE BLOOD' is more knotty, sculpting the vocal into a telecommed buzz and letting it surf on oscillating sine waves and a suggestive rhythm that's half East Coast club and half Chain Reaction dub vapor; meandering nursery rhyme 'QTDTB' meanwhile sounds like a laptop dying while it scrubs through a directory of IDM-cum-foley rave stems.
If you're into anything from Arca and Bladee to OPN, Slug Christ and Crystallmess, this one is v much for you.
