Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland were musical creatures born in a cloud of obfuscation. Their since defunct collaboration in Hype Williams fueled the beginning of the mystery around them. Blunt and Copeland were possibly fake names; in interviews they presented as opaque, put-on, and difficult; and their music was just as willfully obscure. Across their handful of records, their sound was not so much a solid thing, but rather like the thick dry ice fog Blunt prefers to perform under, gaseous and wet. It was a sound at the middle of IDM and pop and hip-hop and performance art. Their music was not exactly made for pleasure in mind, but maybe for thinking or more likely trolling.
Blunt and Copeland ended Hype Williams six years ago, and have not made music together since 2012. Over the past year, a group claiming to be Hype Williams released a pair of albums, but their representatives said Inga and Dean were no longer involved. The same inscrutable electronic sound was present on these records, but apparently they were fakes. Rainbow Edition is the first new officially-sanctioned Hype Williams record since, and the group is now fronted by a duo of musicians called Slaughter & Silvermane (at least according to a picture provided by the group’s reps). The album is 20-songs long, with not many tracks much longer than a minute.
While the sound is not dissimilar to previous Hype Williams efforts, it does have a rudimentary, more aggressively analog feel. The tracks are cleaved from thick, sludgy whacks of 808 drums and cheap synthesizers. They bear the influence of soul and hip-hop, which is not unlike the sound of Blunt’s recent Blue Iverson project (one of a few hints he’s behind this even though he says he’s not), but Rainbow Edition is more distorted. It’s like the kind of shitty-sounding, computerized soul music someone would make for a straight-to-VHS movie—the poor quality recalls the constant static wailing of a dial-up modem.
There are vocals, too, but they often come in snippets of pre-recorded conversation, telephone calls, and static-heavy samples, lending the record a feeling that almost approximates eavesdropping set to clunky music. Take, for example, the opener “Madting,” which is mostly a conversation a woman has with a group of men, accusing them of being “Uncle Toms” as a rinky-dink drum beat plays hesitantly in the background. It sets a sour but intimate tone that the album carries throughout its brief runtime.
While titles like “Cockblocker Blues” or “This Is Mister Bigg. How You Doing Mister Bigg” might suggest only play, this album for the most part is rather melancholic. At its best, Rainbow Edition expertly mixes high and low like in “Spinderella’s Dream,” where jagged synth sounds and angelic choruses intermingle to create what sounds like the prettiest arcade soundtrack ever. But, this being a Hype Williams record, jokes and goofiness are more readily apparent as an animating factor than actual musicianship and songcraft. There are genuinely weird songs, like “The Whole Lay,” which features a helium-inflected, Auto-Tuned voice crooning amid a field of flutes, as if to make a joke on the current trend of flute in pop music.
But then there are strangely poignant moments, like “#Blackcardsmatter,” where a male voice slurs the title phrase over and over again. The title itself is a seemingly crude joke, an inversion of “Black Lives Matter” that references exclusive, income-based credit cards; even more, the prickly, minor key piece sounds like it was composed on a Fisher-Price toy keyboard. But there is a sense of sheer sadness to it all, embodied by the absurdist but piercing lyrics that the heaving voice utters (“They wouldn’t really like this/The interracial thing/All I’ve got to say is Black Cards Matter”). The song is unexpectedly affecting.
Aside from a few bright spots, Rainbow Edition is ultimately a thin record of short, demo-quality beats. Like so many of Hype Williams’ records from the past, this one will feel like a curio or better yet, another reason to ask the question: Who the hell made this?
