Los Angeles beat warper Ras G has spent the better part of the past decade flaunting his alien status, with titles like Brotha From Anotha Planet and El-Aylien Part II: C.razy A.lien accompanying disjointed productions as dizzying as the Milky Way. His copious output (including four albums in 2016 alone) places him in a constellation of prolific beatmakers like Madlib, Knxwledge, and Karriem Riggins. But recently he’s been dropping back down to earth. Stargate Music, his 11th release on Leaving Records, is dedicated (or “livicated,” according to Ras G’s terminology) “to the Womb-man...to the Vagina, The Stargate.”
Ras G’s choice of theme places the album in a lineage extending through Gustave Courbet’s “The Origin of the World” and Funkadelic’s “Nappy Dugout,” but Stargate Music’s concept comes across more as an abstract notion than a literal one; the album lopes through drunken R&B loops, musique concrète, stoned sonic detours, and E.T.-friendly G-funk. Opener “Primordial Water Formations 1” bears all the squelches and static from the dawn of electronic music, like a sonogram from INA-GRM. And the gurgling rhythms of “Water Broken (The Opening of the Stargate)” find Ras G making taffy of a vocal snippet that’s closer in execution to the destabilizing ring modulations of voices on Karlheinz Stockhausen’s “Gesang Der Jünglinge” than to any of his Brainfeeder brothers.
On “The Arrival,” Ras G uses playground handclaps (evocative of FlyLo’s “Putty Boy Strut”) before veering off into a spongy space filled with vocal scatting, laser pulses, and alien radio signals squiggling in the mix. Throughout, Ras G tends to fidget about, and most pieces move on after just a few minutes, never ending up quite where they began. “Quest to Find Anu Stargate” packs the set’s heaviest wallop, but soon, diaphanous jazz chords looming behind the beat spread wider and an R&B coo gently muffles the kick, so that the track winds up feeling more like a drifter than a banger.
The back half of the album becomes harder to pin down, as Ras G switches up styles every few minutes. Phased funk guitar loops, dusted flutes, melted vocal snippets, and flat-tire drum loops wobble in the mix, thumping erratically like sneakers in the dryer. Whether these sounds fizzle or snap, they soon give way to something new. An eerie group chant crops up near album’s end that could have been sampled from some strange, Osho-esque cult recording—which is perhaps only fitting. Bearing titles like “The Nector of Stargate (taste),” “Is It Lust or Love,” and “Heaven is between her legs... (Initiate the return),” Stargate ultimately suggests that as much as Ras G positions himself as an astral traveller, he’s also an earthbound horndog.
