Gone Beyond & Mumbles: Notes From The Underground
The Content Label
In keeping with its Dostoyevskian title, Notes From The Underground is a Russian-themed release by beatmakers Gone Beyond (Dahvin Bugas) and Mumbles (Matthew Fowler). The project began when Cut Chemist asked the duo to contribute to a concert series called The Pravda, which was presented in 2007 at the LA-based Walt Disney Concert Hall. The series itself paid tribute to Russian composers such as Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich, and Prokofiev who lived and worked under Stalin's rule. In an inspired move, one night saw figures like DJ Spooky, Amon Tobin, and, of course, Gone Beyond and Mumbles blending material by the composers with beats. The latter cratediggers clearly took the challenge seriously, spending months sifting through hundreds of classical recordings to find samples of their liking.
Fast-forward a decade and the project returns, this time as a twelve-cut release that channels the spirit of the original event and updates it for the turbulent times now confronting us. But though the album title might connote bleakness and despair, Gone Beyond and Mumbles wish it to be interpreted positively, as a testament to humanity's ability to combat and overcome oppression and adversity in all its forms. It's not the first time, incidentally, the two have issued material on Dday One's Content Label, with Notes From The Underground having been preceded six years earlier by the ten-inch A Duet For Space And Time.
Most of these twentieth-century classical-meets-instrumental hip-hop cuts wed muscular beats to strings and piano, with an additional instrument such as vibes or harpsichord finding its way into the arrangement; extra-musical details also surface to lend atmosphere, with John Gielgud's unmistakable voice surfacing within the latter moments of “The Czar's Muse” and “Fall of the Oligarchs” (The King's Last Stand).” While the twelve tracks are united by theme and a generally plaintive tone, they're also different from one another: whereas an operatic voice intensifies the drama of “Knight in a Panther's Skin,” “Kremlin Epigram” derives much of its punch from a “Bullet the Blue Sky”-styled groove. Speaking of beats, they're at their crispest in the appropriately brooding “Dances With Death.”
A project of this type has the potential to be little more than a lazy exercise in crude mashups of beats and classical samples. Thankfully, Notes From The Underground doesn't fall into that category, though the closing track, “Nevsky's Revenge (The Knight's Templar),” does feel a little bit too much like beats grafted onto an orchestra and choir. Generally, though, the material suggests considerable care was taken in the way elements were combined, and consequently a satisfying sense of integration is achieved. When the beats kick in to join the piano during “Rise of the Proletariat,” for example, the moment sounds like a drummer accompanying a pianist in a live set, not a dusty piano sample merged with a beat pattern created elsewhere.October 2018