Paul White -" Rapping With Paul White"

Label:One Handed Music

‘Rapping With Paul White’ finds the UK producer leading transatlantic talent on a freewheeling hip hop adventure. After four years of carving out his own psychedelic (mainly instrumental) niche on One Handed Music, this long-awaited full-length vocal project is loaded with shining appearances from the cream of current underground MCs. The album is another left turn after last year’s intriguing ‘Paul White & The Purple Brain’ excursion into prog and psych-rock, and deserves to establish its mastermind as one of the most versatile and individual producers working today. While often grouped in the “beats scene” alongside Hudson Mohawke, Flying Lotus and others, Paul White’s hip hop sensibility has always been at the forefront, which partly explains why his 2010 podcast for LA’s Stones Throw Records racked up 300,000 downloads in just a few weeks and alerted a vast new audience to the young Brit. All this meant that assembling some of his favourite MCs was the easy part. Stones Throw artist Guilty Simpson appears twice, his grim warnings perfectly matching the sparse, brooding production on lead single ‘Trust’. Gap-toothed, mohawked Danny Brown is one of rap’s rising stars – a recent signing to A-Trak’s Fool’s Gold label, his lewd punchlines top White’s exuberant production on the not-safe-for-work ‘One Of Life’s Pleasures’. There’s humour in New Yorker Homeboy Sandman’s turn too, as one of hip hop’s most likeable lyricists recounts his cultural missteps during a trip to London over a quintessential Paul White track. Jehst shows why he’s one of the UK’s most respected MCs on ‘Indigo Glow’, and Tranqill lays waste to ‘Rotten Apples’ in the album’s grittiest moment. And how may hip hop records feature a folk singer from Wigan, Nancy Elizabeth laughing her way through a bizarre Edward Lear poem? There’s plenty for fans of Paul’s instrumental work too: from waltzing drum machines to medieval vocoders, the interludes are as compelling as the vocal tracks.

TRACK LIST :   01. Intro: We Make A Lot Of Noise   02. Right On   03. Trust ft Guilty Simpson   04. Run Shit ft Marv Won   05. One Of Life's Pleasures ft Danny Brown   06. The Doldrums   07. Life Is Flashing Interlude   08. Stampeding Elephants ft Moe Pope   09. Rotten Apples ft Tranqill   10. Thirty Days   11. A Weird Day ft Homeboy Sandman   12. African New Wave   13. Indigo Glow ft Jehst   14. Dirty Slang ft Guilty Simpson   15. A New Way   16. Evasive Action   17. Wily Walruses ft Nancy Elizabeth   18. Outro: We'll Never End