DJ Shadow started a mini-revolution with his highly influential 1996 debut album Endtroducing… kick starting a new beat-hungry vinyl culture where everything from psych rock to obscure electronica could be used to make a quality hip-hop record.
Shadow certainly opened many doors for his contemporaries to express themselves fully, and instrumental hip-hop has since been a purposeful genre in its right. Even through the use of samples, the music displays as much of the soul of the artist as if they had composed the music and played the instruments themselves.
Like Shadow before him Express Rising's Dante Carfagna is an instrumental hip-hop pioneer, though unlike Shadow he is relatively unknown in mainstream musical circles. A good friend of Josh Davies and part of a collective of Memphis DJ’s and rare record collectors, Carfagna fully typifies the crate digging DJ. Carfagna started out back in 1992 producing and scratching on a few Professor Griff records.
Since then he’s been regularly putting out awe-inspiring instrumental 45’s in limited runs under the guise of Express Rising for Memphix Records. Ironically those 45’s are now almost as rare and sought after as the records which he used to create them.
Express Rising- The Album
This self titled album was released on Memphix back in 2003, and again but of the limited run of copies on both vinyl and CD, the album is hugely sought after and commands ridiculous prices despite being less than 10 years old.
The music on the album is warm and atmospheric with an aesthetic leaning towards subtly and minimalism which sets Carfagna apart from Shadow’s own theatrical and sometimes melodramatic instrumentals. The samples themselves are so abstracted that there are few references points which helps the listener to be caught up in the music itself rather than wondering where the loop came from in the first place.
Minimalistic
It may just be because of the predominance of piano and organ on the record, but the music comes across almost like that of Erik Satie. There’s the same wistfulness and melancholy as found in the core of Satie’s work, creating an introverted self of nostalgia: reliving places you’ve never been to or remembering things long forgotten.
Just listen to the lonesome, fractured piano line on “Keys to Be”, or the atmospheric beginning of “Neighbourhood” where the melancholic guitar line calls over the quiet voices of children playing. He’s taken the idea of hip-hop culture from being music for the ego, and inverted it to become reflective and contemplative. The lamenting piano line on “Cardinal, Fly How?” is a case in point.
There are times when Carfagna ups the tempo falling back on heavy break beats to push the tracks forward, like the funk bounce of “Comfortable with Failure” or “Dead Mall”. But throughout, the record seems more concerned with evoking thought and quiet emotion than anything else.
Way back in 1996 DJ Shadow asked us “What Does Your Soul Look Like?”, and from this album it can be ascertained that Carfagna’s soul surely takes solace in the serene.
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