Meet Brandon. Our Second Marion Contributor.

Meet Brandon.

He's a cool guy, lives in the twin cities, plays music, avid beer drinker...and our newest contributor. Check in to read his posts about all things music. He writes it, records it, and listens to it...all three things you want in a music writer! Check out his first article below and make sure to keep an eye out!

GAHEDiNDIE Find Salvation in Static


The primary force behind one of Minneapolis’ loudest and most chaotic acts, Emcee/Producer K., describes his current project GAHEDiNDIE in vague yet alluring terms:

“Some people call what we do ‘noise rap’. We rep the Desert. We care about the human condition.”

The word “noise” should not be under-emphasised here. Even a cursory spin of their 2011 LP “Sana Sana” makes it very clear that GAHEDiNDIE owe as much to anarchy as they do to form.

Their style is something like what The Velvet Underground’s “Black Angel’s Death Song” might sound like if Lou Reed was a rapper instead of a singer. Often involving little or no melody, GAHEDiNDIE’s songs vacillate between disturbing freakouts and chaotic bliss; first developing and then spontaneously losing shape behind massive walls of static, disjointed guitar squeals and muffled vocal samples.

A good example of this is the track “Olvides”, where K. rhymes disjointedly and unintelligibly behind heavy drums and layers of atmospheric synth, the music continually breaking down and building up again. Many tracks on the album follow a similar pattern, that is, freedom from predictability. Structure never enters into the picture for any of these songs as K. prefers to let the music flow from menacing soundscape to hip-hop verse and back again.

Make no mistake that this is a new kind of hip-hop and it isn’t playing by any conventional rules. While K.’s flow and style are strong, the lyrics are playing second fiddle to the overall production. On most tracks the vocals are buried in the mix or off to one channel where they fight for attention against the grainy, driving beats.

Upon first exposure, GAHEDiNDIE’s aggressive sound is a little hard to handle, it’s only after several listens to “Sana Sana” that certain things come to light. Despite a concentrated focus on oppressive production there is a great deal of nuance here also. The album’s closer, “Sin”, rides on a relatively clean beat while both sides of your headphones are being treated to a series of beeps, reverberating effects and uncharacteristically melodic keys. Not until about my third listen did the collaborative quality of these seemingly contradictory elements reveal themselves to be an extremely impressive and well-crafted audio collage.

Since the album’s release in january of last year K. has been working on the follow up “Nausea” which will be released this October. K. hopes this second effort will garner more attention than the first, citing that he’s been in contact with what he describes as “well known, independent labels” hoping to increase exposure to his sound. He also spoke about the tone of the next record:

“‘Nausea’ is an evolution on our noise aspect. More melody, less noise, big drum. Tribal. Lyrics are upfront as opposed to buried under the noise. We want motherfuckers to feel the rap as well as mood. If ‘Sana Sana’ was noise ‘Nausea’ is mood. We will release it October 2nd 2012. Label or not.”

K. has released two new tracks from “Nausea” already, “Add Noise” and “Tribalxstatic”. Both appear to rely on the same aesthetic as GAHEDiNDIE’s previously released material but we’ll see what shakes out when the album is released later this year.

You can download “Sana Sana” (at a price of your own choosing) at www.noiserap.com.

-This story was originally published on "Secret Laboratory" http://secretlaboratory.org/?p=4553