专辑简介

Underground slick yet daring Chicago veteran MC Gilead7 of the Windy City super collective Tomorrow Kings has completed yet another audio diamond to accompany the already existing brilliance of his nationally and internationally distributed collection of uniquely-created albums. Known and respected by his scattered international cult following for not only his record collaborations and stage sharing with everyone from Vast Aire and A.G to Wize Guy and the Juggaknots but also his sonically experimental and lyrically razor-edged abrasive “art rap” for over 12 years, Gilead has etched an indelible place for himself in indie hip-hop, combining aggressive universe creation and quirky nerdom in ways that only he could pull off. Gilead has teamed up with La Puente, California’s boom-bap esoteric master producer Subtrax to briefly return to the speaker-piercing breakbeats and avant garde jazz era sampled sounds that filled his first two basement cassette releases that garnered him his early tastes of Windy City notoriety. The newly-formed duo call this album Peaces of War. Subtrax, co-founder of the well-respected Southern California-based hip-hop collective Echoes of Oratory Muzik and producer of the Echoes flagship crew Crop Circles 720, laces Gilead (the newest member of the Echoes crew and also now a resident of So Cal) with upper echelon production rooted in classic mid to late 90’s boom bap and dusty roughness while maintaining a fresh sound conversant and on par with underground hip-hop’s current state.

This is the last project of its kind; the official grand finale of an era. While many projects of late, in an attempt to stay relevant, take on the boom bap sound while softening it in either rhymes, production, or both, G7 and Subz stay even more relevant by delivering a project that is extremely sharp on both ends. Gilead’s philosophy behind Peaces of War is this: everything in the universe is composed of a duality of disturbance (war) and serenity (peace), and one side never conquers the other. The album asserts to the listener that the realization of universal balance through peace and war ends the futile quest of trying to solve for either side. In “Shoveling,” over Subtrax’s sword-sharp rolling percussion and thick melancholy atmospheric wickedness, Gilead, I.B. Fokuz, and Clockwize embody the dualistic tension held between the underground and the mainstream, as they take on the character of miners digging through corrupted soil to discover the true priceless vinyl of the Gods hidden at the deepest levels. “Mask Wardrobe” with Word Man uniquely explores a type of what DuBois would call “double-consciousness” as we negotiate our non-European heritage within a Euro-American-dominated work culture for mental and ancestral survival. Over Subz’s brooding drums and muddy piano sampled track, “Piece Offering” is literally Gilead’s short rap lecture on religion, Afro-diasporic and Native Mesoamerican history, and the hypocrisy of hip-hop culture, offering broken “pieces” of misconceptions to the listener, who must inevitably hold on to them even though they’re irreparably shattered. With the darkest, hardest, and strangely melodic sounds, unorthodox rhythms, secularly theological writing, and confrontational thoughts, Gilead7 and Subtrax have truly given the culture its last uncompromising boom bap record before the future, looking beyond the subgenre through the subgenre itself to see the next sound. The self-proclaimed last prophets of classic boom bap, Gilead7 and Subtrax present the final gospel of the glorious purely raw breakbeat and sample era of our youth, and completed it on the highest note possible. Now we can move toward the new, knowing full well that any needed eulogy to a “Golden Era” was sung in uncontained celebration in the annals of Peaces of War.