Throughout his brief career, the Belgian beatmaker ShunGu has been simultaneously so ahead of the curve and so underground that you worry he’s in danger of being hit by a subway car. He turned heads in 2014 with a series of beat tapes named for the astrological signs, a good three years before the first @NotAllGeminis Instagram post. His beats were influenced by the genre’s godheads—Dilla, Madlib, Knxwledge—but set apart by a healthy amount of personality and wit that seemed specific to Louis ShunGu’s vision. He would take rap classics like “Da Art of Storytellin’” (on The Leo Tape’s “All.Love”) and transpose them to a setting so different that it was as if you had never heard the original before. And he showed himself to have good taste in collaborators, partnering with some of the brighter lights of Bandcamp’s rap scene, including Chester Watson and the Hot Record Société.
On his new record, A Black Market Album, you can tell that ShunGu, now 28, makes a point of keeping up with his contemporaries. There’s a good amount of Kaytranada in this thing, as well as some sounds derived from the Internet’s standout beatmakers, Matt Martians and Steve Lacy. But the compact set of beats and raps ShunGu serves up here is, with its perfectly chosen drums and subtle swagger, reminiscent of nothing so much as golden-age Slum Village and other pre-Donuts J. Dee classics.
“Roll With Me” is the first song to give you that old Detroit feel. Its drum sounds hit hard and distinct, never disappearing into the mix, as important as Pink Siifu’s excellent raps. (The gruff, belching bass, meanwhile, borrows from a later Dilla trick, one showcased on the posthumous track “E=MC2”). After a lovely, Slum Village-like sung interlude, “Groove It Baby,” we’re back to rap with the track “Drop Knowledge.” The song carries an echo of its predecessor; you can still hear the voice singing, “We just gotta groove it baby,” as Spote Breeze walks up to the mic.
How does ShunGu choose his collaborators? The ever-compelling Siifu, the Oakland-based Spote Breeze, and Mamoyo, the spoken-word lyricist featured on the last track, are all good at the whole words thing. But what unites them further is their sense of musicality. The happiest contradiction on A Black Market Album is the way that standout elements seem inextricable: The drums, lyrics, synths, and melodies all stand apart, yet each is impossible to envision functioning without the others. It’d be hard to guess which sound was produced first; you imagine them all springing into being simultaneously.
Spote Breeze’s verse on “Drop Knowledge” deserves a little extra attention, with nested jokes as dense as Doom’s. It took me a couple times to figure out why he was rapping about Romney retaking office. Finally I realized that he had made a crack about people trying to catch his jokes, “but the mitt won’t fit.” (Many of his punchlines come a bar or two after they’re expected, which heightens the pleasure of the landing.) Like Baatin and T3 before him, Breeze’s raps are breezily lyrical, clever, and politically informed. He’s a smart guy, and he doesn’t care whether you think so or not.
The back half of A Black Market Album is mildly less compelling. With its glimmering synths and multi-patterned drums, the minute-long beat “Let’s Go Outside” is just a little too indebted to Kaytranada for comfort. While the other short beats back here (“There’s a War Outside” and “Tokyo Express”) are diverting, they’re less original than ShunGu’s work with his trio of wonderful lyricists. But the record is only 22 minutes long, so these (perfectly good) tracks breeze right by until suddenly you arrive at the closer, “Touch by Sun,” on which ShunGu bathes Mamoyo’s poetry with warm sonic rays. Spoken word sometimes gets a bad rap, but this is pretty unimpeachable.
Shungu is from Brussels and, as with the best of YouTube’s “lofi” channels (most of which are run from the Continent), it’s fascinating to hear the lineage of instrumental hip-hop refracted through a European lens, continuing a long tradition of Europe taking America’s music and making it just a little bit weirder. As with the lofi channels, there’s a sense of community that radiates through the record (Siifu, characteristically, even shouts out his parents), giving the lie to the idea that true communities can’t form online. A Black Market Album doesn’t seem thrown together, by any means, but it’s just as casual as a rooftop party on the first truly warm day of the year. That easy feeling makes sense, given the producer’s process: “I cut my sample with my ears,” he explained in a 2014 interview. “I just follow my ears.”
