Thankfully, five-dollar music crit adjectives don't fit Montreal DJ and producer Ghislain Poirier's style. So we can torch words like "gossamer," "delicate," "woozy," or "gauzy." As Peter Macia said in Pitchfork about Poirier's 2005 Breakupown, Poir's at his aesthetic best when "frivolities have been ground to dust." No Ground Under, Poirier's sixth album-- and first on Ninja Tune-- has that same commitment to uncluttered, cutting bass while still packing a full range of machine gun beats. It may also be the best entryway into his work.
No Ground is taut, alkaline, and-- in its sharpest places-- it lives up to its title. Poirier still hacks and welds and splices, but instead of throwing around cheap, sometimes irritating digital-dust effects, he redlines instruments to their lab-doctored optimum. On "Hit & Red", bass kicks flap and flatten and pump like Andre the Giant's iron lung. When the guitar strum on "No More Blood" finishes its one-second loop, it cuts like a razor, rendering what should have been a matte into something lacerating.
Listeners familiar with Poirier's brassy remixes (of everyone from Lil' Wayne to Lady Sovereign), will recognize his favorite techniques, a sort of wish list for contemporary rap instrumentals: Hard, traditional 4/4 drums with a grab-bag of loops that aren't so much mutated as made superhuman. On "Exils", the song's strings loop back as they tune, swarming together and whipped into something that resembling the ESG classic "UFO".
Poirier's MC selection skews appropriately to the underground (Chicago's Zulu, Français Ambitieux) just as the album's aesthetic goes the way of fellow po-mo deconstructivists (Weezy, Foster Wallace). He touches on all your tropes and lets his MCs grab for intellectual flash points like so many brass rings: He titles a song "Diaspora". He has an MC shout: "Lebanon! Up in England! Over Syria! In Nigeria!"
Yet there's something somethingly deeply vivifing about Poirier's blend of spartan yet far-flung sonic DNA and his naked political ambitions. Maybe it's how fantastic he sounds alongside contemporary American hip-hop and how successful he might be hawking album beats to everyone from MF Doom to Redman. Maybe it's because even with his sloppy, earnest political ambitions, indeed nothing about his execution feels frivilous. Maybe it's simply the drum and bell on "One Hand Can't Clap" and a dozen other sounds besides.
