Album Review: V/A - HVW8 presents: Music Is My Art (Ubiquity)

Writer: Scott Wright

Comic Sans walks into a bar and asks for a beer. The barman says, “Sorry, we don’t serve your type in here.” Badoom tish. That’s my font joke. If you want you can embellish it by saying that Comic Sans walked into a saloon bar and when told he wouldn’t be served, threatened to call the Serif, but I think it’s best to keep these things simple. Why the font gag? Because this is an album compiled by graphic designers. While that might sound a bit Nathan Barley – like marketing execs who also design a line of deconstructed t-shirts or advertising creatives who moonlight as grime MCs – the chaps at HV8 are better placed than most to pull it off.

A three-man Montreal and Los Angeles-based art collective, HVW8 comprise a graphic designer and two illustrators. They’re renowned for creating art works live at music events, where they paint music legends like Fela Kuti or Afrika Bambaataa while the likes of Gilles Peterson and Roots Manuva provide aural entertainment. The design crew often use musical analogies to describe their work: they approach their paintings like a DJ approaches a remix; their live painting is “part discipline and structure and part completely free flowing and improvised like a piece of jazz music.”

Music Is My Art represents the next step in their cross-medium experimentation, and like switching from Times New Roman to Franklin Gothic Medium, it’s a bold move. While the name HVW8 suggests they’re mad keen on text messaging, the tunes they’ve selected reveal a fondness for beats that are broken, soul that is nu, and hip-hop that is pleasantly jazzy.

HVW8 describe the album as an “opportunity to shine a light on new talent.” Perhaps it is just a happy coincidence that many of those acts are signed to Ubiquity, a label whose strong visual identity HVW8 helped to create. Either way, their choice of partner is a good one. Ubiquity is riding high at the moment, a label in full bloom, and their reputation as purveyors of sophisticated dance music can only be enhanced by this collection.

While established names like Plantlife and Osunlade provide tracks that are typical if not outstanding examples of their signature sounds, many of the debutants deliver the goods. Newcomer Black Spade does a nice line in collegiate hip hop, while Radio City and Owusu & Hannibal deliver two different but quirky takes on contemporary soul.

There are some great club tunes here, too. John Arnold’s Rise Up is a driving, horn-fuelled slice of broken soul that bears favourable comparison to fellow Detroiter Recloose. Yam Who? take a break from remixing every third song in the world to cover an old LA Boppers track - Wrap U Up is a sweet slice of boogie with some lovely changes, but shame it meanders on for eight-and-a-half minutes rather than ending with a bang after four.

My favourite tracks here are the ones that stray furthest from the worldwide, future funk template. Kingsbread’s It’s Alright, a haunting soul shuffle, is given dramatic weight by Steve Spacek’s disturbingly cracked vocal. He sounds like a man for whom heartbreak provokes a particularly distressing form of psychosis, and his performance sets it apart from some of the album’s prettier outings. And Seiji’s awesome Bruqwah is as rough as broken beat gets. All bare bones and sub-bass, it sounds like a dirty old Shut Up & Dance rave tune drunk on Co-Op crunk juice. It’s not so much rude as fucking out of order.

Alas, not everything here is that exciting. HVW8 have explained that some of the songs here were exchanged for artwork, and it’s tempting to surmise that while Seiji took delivery of an 12” x 8” oil painting, J-Boogie’s limp uninspired offering earned him a couple of photocopied doodles.

The HVW8 gang has done a solid job here and can go back to their sketchpads heads held high. I advise you check out their day job on their comprehensive and predictably well designed website, www.hvw8.com. And if they’re ever in your town, and this album is a good indication of what one of their nights sounds like, you’ll be in for a good, if not GR8, night out.

RELATED LINKS:
HVW8 - offical website
Ubiquity



Buy HVW8 presents: Music Is My Art at Amazon UK (CD) / US (CD)




PUBLISHED: 11 September 2005

RELEASE DATE: 26 September 2005 (UK) / 13 September 2005 (US) .

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