Tadd Mullinix wasn’t sure if he’d ever make another Dabrye record. A decade ago, after the deaths of his mother and his major inspiration and one-time collaborator J Dilla contributed to a feeling of writer’s block, the Ann Arbor producer put his electronic hip-hop project on ice. He didn’t quit music entirely—he’s since made leftfield techno, house, and jungle under aliases, and formed his own label, Bopside—but diehard fans of 2001’s One/Three and 2006’s Two/Three were left holding out hope for a follow-up. Now he’s delivered with this sprawling collection of 19 tracks, a notably looser and more organic listen than its predecessors.
In a world where dance beats have been thoroughly embraced by mainstream rappers and Jay Dee acolytes run labels and headline stadiums, the question that looms over Three/Three is whether Mullinix’s once-futuristic productions still sound innovative. “Never affected by new sellers,” gruff-voiced Stones Throw mainstay Guilty Simpson vows on opening track “Tunnel Vision,” an affirmation that could easily double as Dabrye’s own mission statement. Instead of bowing to current trends, he burrows further into gritty ’90s boom-bap and proto-electronic influences (you can hear traces of Daphne Oram, Mort Garson, and Morton Subotnick), weaving internationally-sourced samples into his intricately layered compositions.
Three/Three is stacked with features from Detroit area MCs (Danny Brown, Clear Soul Forces) and heavy-hitting veterans (MF DOOM, Ghostface Killah), but only a handful of his guests truly rise to the occasion. On “Pretty,” Los Angeles journeyman Jonwayne effortlessly delivers tongue-in-cheek punchlines overtop muffled horns and jazzy keys. Elsewhere, the eerie, Sunday morning cartoon-sampling “Lil Mufukuz” reunites the producer and DOOM, who gleefully schools SoundCloud stars and “snotty-nosed club rats.” Less successful are the relatively unknown trio of Kadence, Intricate Dialect, and Silas Green, whose clunky socio-political musings on “Culture Shuffle” will make listeners wish somebody had gotten Mullinix a landline to Jay Electronica instead.
What’s frustrating about the amount of mic time ceded to lesser talents over the record’s 57 minutes is that the producer clearly knows how to self-edit: Look no further than “Electrocutor,” his Motor City take on the pioneering BBC Radiophonic Workshop’s experimental electronic scores from the ’60s and ’70s. Most vocalists would get bowled over by the track’s industral clangs and hard-driving percussion, but Dabrye knows better than to touch a sparking live wire.
The album’s highest peaks, directly contrasting the frequent hey-kids-get-off-my-lawn sentiments and cliché battle raps that bog down its second half, come courtesy of Mullinix’s collaborations with younger Michiganders. It’s not hard to hear his DNA in the music of artists like the jazz-trained producer Shigeto—especially on last year’s adventurous ZGTO project A Piece of the Geto with Bruiser Brigade rapper ZeelooperZ—and Brown, whose 2016 record Atrocity Exhibition fit in well with its labelmates on Warp Records. When the latter MC bats cleanup after Roc Marciano and Quelle Chris on “The Appetite,” his ecstatic yelps perfectly complement the song’s ominous, video-game-synth-loaded beat. Shigeto, meanwhile, shines on the languid, cut-up funk instrumental “Sunset,” which deftly juxtaposes shimmering piano loops with staticky Jamaican soundclash echoes.
In a recent interview with the Detroit Metro Times, the 39-year-old producer said that while he has no plans to retire the Dabrye moniker again, 2018 will also see the release of music under his new alias X-Altera. (The name is a reference to techno luminaries Robert Hood and Jeff Mills’ Underground Resistance projects X-102 and X-103.) Three/Three might be the conclusion of one trilogy, but its strongest ideas suggest that Mullinix’s next round of spinoffs will be well worth the price of admission.
