In the opening scene in John Frankenheimer’s 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate, Frank Sinatra’s character, Major Bennett Marco, dreams that he and his former squadron are attending a ladies’ garden party in New Jersey. Soon, we realize the scene is a dream within a dream: The garden party is a shared hallucination by the soldiers, sitting catatonic in a medical theater in China, where they have been made guinea pigs for a Communist brainwashing program. The soldiers’ false tea party and the sordid conference become intertwined—the Communists show up in New Jersey, and the hydrangea-obsessed matron stands at the podium in Manchuria. The film loses itself in the enslaved squadron’s nightmare. Presiding over the pitch-black comedy is the mysterious Chinese doctor and hypnotist Yen Lo, who ultimately brings the garden party to a close by ordering the Sergeant, Raymond Shaw (played by Laurence Harvey), to kill two of his own comrades.
The scene introduces the brutal, hopelessly entangled systems of control and indoctrination that dominate The Manchurian Candidate, the elements of the story that interest Brooklyn rapper and producer Ka and producer Preservation on their new album, Days With Dr. Yen Lo. The album does not in any way retrace the plot of the film or the book that inspired it (a page, half-obscured, is the cover of the album), but instead engages with its themes, playing off of sound bites interspersed between songs. The album and the twist-filled noir share a paranoiac atmosphere: Tension is everywhere and nowhere in particular. Nothing turns out right; no one breaks the shackles that held them without a scar or much worse. “Yen Lo,” in both, is the unrepentant arbiter of fate, both the cold facts and entropy of life, concentrated into one force.
The primary conflict in Ka’s verses is the same as that of Shaw’s and Marco’s: attempting to self-actualize, after realizing you’ve been under the thrall of a deception that has contorted your entire sense of reality for so long. In most of these songs, the lies Ka unravels relate to crime: the insidious desire to commit it, and the systemic filing-down of one’s moral fabric that allows one to do so. In just a few lines, Ka can evoke simultaneously the fear, desperation, and poisonous ennui of his particular troubled upbringing, though he speaks for more than himself: “Crime is how mind rewarded doubt/Time’s a drought, climb that waterspout/Itsy bitsy, slung to get crispy/Almost choked in the web spun to fix me.” Ka positions music itself as part of the process of reclaiming himself, and rapping as a way to access thoughts and emotions that might otherwise seem out of reach to him, or those who can relate to his stories.
To communicate all this most transparently, Ka lets his words phrase themselves, recalling NYC-area forbearers like Guru and Rakim. The dizzying inner consonances in his lines jump out of their own accord, as if Ka, with his hushed, unwavering monotone, is simply a vessel for them to move through; all of the action and consternation has already occurred on the notepad. His great skill is his almost inconceivable level of control and precision. Just the honeyed sounds of his words are hypnotizing in themselves; his expertly matched vowel sounds melt into one uninterrupted stream in some phrases, registering almost like one low whistle. His pace is continuous, sometimes dizzying. Processing both form and content at once requires a specific type of meditative listening: the kind that can only happen once one has lost track of themselves in the sound, and let distractions and interference gradually fall away, rather than pushing them off. Trying too hard to latch onto anything here means automatically falling behind.
But reaching this type of deep-listening nirvana is not a necessity; this is music that sounds great any way you come at it. Preservation’s production is a psychedelic, sometimes seasick symphony of fragments from LPs, often cut out in large swatches and dovetailed into one another expertly. At times, a shag-carpet studio orchestra sweeps toward climaxes without really reaching them; more often, a simple, plaintive guitar lick drones, or a warbling organ peals unexpectedly, recalling either a gospel coda or a spy thriller soundtrack. There are also some of the small, locked-groove loops Ka gravitated towards on his previous two LPs—more pulsations than kernels of melody or licks, flickering like candles on the verge of burning out.
One of the most notable aspects of the album is its near-complete lack of percussion. Few of these songs include kick and snare drums, and none are anchored by them. His voice—in the middle of the mix, bolstered by eerie, re-pitched overdubs—is the only consistent rhythm instrument. Ka has phased out elements of the typical East Coast–indigenous rap beat architecture over his past several releases (most dramatically on the ascetic The Night’s Gambit, with its charcoal-shaded minimalism) and here, we’ve reached a new type of free fall.
Ka’s sound is so specific that it is easy to hear a new release, register it as more of the same, and coast through it. But you’d miss the most stunning element of his work: the way in which the rapper seems to cut a little bit more of something away with each new project, something which unnecessarily complicates his ideal mode of direct and razor-sharp communication. Here, he allows more negative space in, creates pictures more economically, peels away some vestigial density. The old releases hold the same power, but every time you grab a new Ka release, it feels as if you are holding a more refined product.
