AEM114 Blissed Out

There’s a moment-a bunch of moments, actually-in Jay-Z’s 2009 monster-jam “Empire State of Mind” where, hid­den under­neath the real-estate shout outs and bends-inducing com­pres­sion like a C-section scar on a TV actress, you can pick out some­thing wrong, jar­ring, fucked-up. Tune in at around 21 sec­onds and you can hear it: this high-pitched clip, like a CD skip­ping or a steak knife strik­ing a glass table. It’s a strange lit­tle imper­fec­tion to find in a more or less immac­u­lately con­structed pop song, some­thing osten­si­bly unre­lated to musi­cian­ship or writ­ing, but still too much there to be con­sid­ered an over­sight. Every ten sec­onds or so it pops up out of nowhere, grind­ing at the gears of the cho­rus, tear­ing the whole jam apart from the inside out like an arm­ful of bot fly babies.

I bring this up not only because Blissed Out, an NYC-based duo spe­cial­iz­ing in all kinds of trunk-rattling audio detri­tus, have a genius edit of this track, but because that millisecond-long mis­take in “Empire” and the mas­sive circuit-bent mixol­ogy this group throw down flow from the same old-school source. Rap is quite a bit dif­fer­ent today than it was a decade ago, sure, but where most heads like to whine about the lyri­cal tran­si­tion from the socially-conscious to the fiscally-conservative, it’s also impor­tant to note how that the­matic shift has been mir­rored in the genre’s musi­cal method­ol­ogy. Sam­pling, record scratch­ing, the infi­nite rep­e­ti­tion of a break­beat were all tran­scen­dent sonic mal­func­tions, punk ges­tures stem­ming from the same kind of tech­no­log­i­cal anti-humanism as play­ing slide gui­tar with a lead pipe or cut­ting up your torso with a bunch of bro­ken beer bot­tles thrown hate­fully at the stage. Synth-crazed Man­nie Fresh-ness, on the other hand, no mat­ter how great it might sound vibrat­ing the tinted win­dows of your Escalade, doesn’t inspire fear of a black planet, just envy of a black AmEx. Which is why, when Hova’s biggest hit in years comes acci­den­tally equipped with inces­sant, intru­sive nois­i­ness, we not only get a throw­back to the auto-destructing golden years of rap, but an excit­ing insight into how this sort of musi­cal antag­o­nism could pop a hole in hip-hop’s fat-suit. This is where Blissed Out really come into the pic­ture, tak­ing that phan­tom peak off “Empire” and spin­ning it not only into a sin­gle remix, but an entire project’s worth of deeply dam­aged low end the­ory. If these guys were some­how selected to pro­duce Jigga’s next album, it would be released on Deaf Jam, and instead of being Black, it would be the kinds of col­ors you see when some­one punches you really hard in the face.

“Both hip hop and noise involve re-appropriating instru­ments and tech­nol­ogy, remov­ing them from their intended con­texts and cre­at­ing some­thing new with that,” says Alex, one half of the group, on Blissed Out’s con­cep­tual her­itage. “There also is a phys­i­cal con­nec­tion between hip hop and harsh noise. That is, a phys­i­cal feel­ing one gets when lis­ten­ing to it, cre­ated by the fre­quen­cies. With hip hop, this is found in the extreme low tones used and with noise the extreme highs that are often found.” It’s usu­ally bad news when rock writ­ers con­flate sig­na­ture son­ics with biography—Ray Charles’ ivory style mim­ic­k­ing a heroin score, Justin Beiber’s pedophile-baiting croon being any­thing more than an acci­dent of pre­pu­bes­cence, and so on—but this dichotomy of found sound and phys­i­cal pain, a dev­as­tat­ing low to a redemp­tive, ear-cleansing high, seems dis­tinctly related to the band’s for­ma­tion. When asked about it, Alex says, obliquely, “I almost died. But a lit­tle less than 2 years before that, I met Sasha…” Sasha being dude num­ber two in BO. Long story short, Alex got sick for an entire year, under­went surgery, con­fined him­self to his apart­ment and redis­cov­ered an old sam­pler he had bought when he was younger. A series of early morn­ing elec­tro work­outs fol­lowed, these one-man-jam seshes cul­mi­nat­ing in an extended impro­vised sound check with Sasha one evening in 2009 at a house show in Bed Stuy. Like Gille­spie meet­ing Parker, or Cash join­ing Carter, it was pure Bliss.

It’s rare to find a band with this refined an aes­thetic, let alone one that’s been play­ing together for less than a year. Falling some­where between Merzbow-ian tape-fuckery, the dis­torted narco-haze of 90s shoegaze, 808s and heart dis­ease, Blissed Out man­age to con­dense and amplify the ele­men­tal night­mare of new-century pop music—that it’s made by machines, that it has no soul—into some­thing that makes assim­i­la­tion into SkyNet not seem like such a ter­ri­ble idea after all. Plenty of peo­ple are push­ing elec­tron­ica in emo­tive, wonky direc­tions, but where the vibe of some­thing like Dis­aro and witch house is spooky in an anachro­nis­tic way—old, creaky houses and super-8 film—Blissed Out excels in thor­oughly mod­ern modes of ter­ror, the sound of your brain cells turn­ing into num­bers, the rape-breathing of a thou­sand sen­tient sam­plers, the holo­graphic image of Peter Brotz­man con­duct­ing a full-blown army of pix­e­lated machine guns.

The two tracks posted here come off the group’s White Tri­an­gle cas­sette, recorded live at Silent Barn and released by Mir­ror Uni­verse Tapes in June. A-side “+Empire State of Mind Edit+” we men­tioned before, and B-side “+Trop­i­cal Fan­tasy+” retains a sim­i­lar pay­load of skit­ter­ing, under­wa­ter beat­work wrapped inside a var­ie­gated caul of bit-crushed dub. The song titles all have pluses at either end, kind of like a bat­tery with only pos­i­tive ends.

Keep­ing in tune with that hope­ful tip, Alex con­cludes, “I get the most inspired to cre­ate by lis­ten­ing to hot 97, read­ing art and fash­ion magazines, late night walks around the city, and the peo­ple that are around us. Even before record­ing music for Blissed Out, I had fallen into some­thing where I kept meet­ing peo­ple, then, fol­low­ing that, dis­cov­er­ing they were cre­at­ing music. See­ing all of these kids around me doing it made me real­ize that cre­at­ing music wasn’t an unat­tain­able goal.” Ali­cia Keyes, dodg­ing the demon clip, play­ing the world’s loud­est piano, said it her­self: there’s noth­ing you can’t do. Out of New York, that is.

Ben Las­man

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