Hip-hop Should Meet Gonjasufi

Pitchfork describes him best:

Gonjasufi is the latest musical incarnation of Sumach Ecks, a rapper-singer-yoga teacher currently living in Las Vegas. Though he’s been making hip-hop records since the early 90s and has released music with the San Diego-based Masters of the Universe crew, it’s his recent singles as Gonjasufi that are gaining him more notice than ever before. The album features worn-in, Dilla-descended production from L.A.’s the Gaslamp Killer, Mainframe, and Flying Lotus (Gonjasufi was featured on “Testament” off FlyLo’s Los Angeles), but the unequivocal star is Ecks’s voice– a scraggly, scary, smoked-out croak that creeps like the spiritual offspring of George Clinton and Leadbelly.

And again, ever so eloquently:

Seven months after its release, A Sufi and a Killer still sounds like a remarkable work of post-hip-hop psychedelia. It’s an album that fits on an unusual continuum somewhere between classic backpacker breaks and hazy garage rock, creating a unified sound out of supposedly disparate scenes through sheer force of personality. And the singer who made that unification work did so with a multi-faceted voice– everything from foggy, deadpan muttering to vivid falsetto soul, all wrapped up in an air of relatable mystery– that made it all come together.

But let this be an appeal to the hip-hop fan, one who has his eyes on both Kanye and Camp Lo at the same time, to give Gonjasufi a proper listen. He’s the type of artist who is a hard sell in today’s world of rigid iTunes categorization, and rolling with genre bender du jour Flying Lotus and releasing under the appropriately titled Warp Records further removes him from the mainstream consciousness. But if nothing else, consider this a simple recommendation from a rap fan. You will like Gonjasufi because throughout its weirdness, its diving bass lines and grungy samples, there is an uncanny familiarity that is both comfortable and itchy at the same time. It could be the purest hip-hop released these days, or the furthest from it. If nothing else, check out his psychedelic, kaleidoscopic website and play around with it. Then read this post again.