R.A.P. FERREIRA - Bob’s Son: R.A.P. Ferreira In The Garden Level Cafe Of The Scallops Hotel

This album is an ode to the poet bob kaufman

The inventor of frink and beat

The progenitor of abomunism

The chief bomkoff

Connoisseur of oatmeal cookies

Rory Ferreira makes it clear from the title itself that this is a tribute album to beat poet Bob Kaufman, but that doesn't really prepare you for what you'll hear on his second album under his own name: rather than a celebratory project, the artist seems intent on transposing Kaufman into a jazz-rap context. It's a curious project as a follow-up to the intriguing debut "Purple Moonlight Pages" (2020), retaining some of its stylistic traits while also establishing itself as a bolder, more abstract sonic experiment, dense and visionary in its lyrics. Produced entirely by Ferreira himself under the alias Scallops Hotel, the album opens with a spoken-word piece, "Battle Report", which proves useful in setting the lo-fi, dreamlike, vintage and eccentric tone of the whole work.

"The Cough Bomber's Return" then serves as a fuller introduction to the project, with its hypnotic loops and fragmentary structure, a stream-of-consciousness development that makes the division into tracks essentially arbitrary: it's hard to imagine listening to the record as anything less than a single continuous piece, one that, like a mid-length film, only feels complete when experienced in its entirety.

On this abstract canvas, studded with samples and shifting beats, the artist's agile, supple rap moves like a cat, leaping effortlessly between the jazz fragments of "Yamships, Flaxseed" and the dreamy chords of the Kanye-West-indebted "Rejoice", or providing the rhythmic and melodic structure itself on "Diogenes On The Auction Block", even duelling with a frenzied bass-driven rhythmic construct on the closing reading of the "Abomunist Manifesto".

The centerpiece, "Redguard Snipers", is a faded polaroid of the early Nineties, refracted through a thousand hypnagogic echoes, building to an inevitable unraveling and a spectacular blow-up that gives way to a lo-fi rap steeped in unsettling shadows. The fabric slowly comes back together on "Sips Of Ripple Wine", with a chaotic crescendo of soul and jazz intertwined with a radio recording and a dreamy arpeggio, before "Skrenth" arrives at a synthesis of elegance and tension, a murky, highly suspenseful jazz-rap.

Whenever it can, the production shatters and blurs the sonic material, as in the psychedelic echoes of "Bobby Digital's Little Wings" or the tinkering with tempo on "Listening", but here and there it also plays with the thickness of the arrangements, stripping everything down to something rarefied and skeletal, as in the aforementioned "Battle Report" or the middle section of "Redguard Snipers", or layering it instead, as in the enveloping choral cloud of "High Rise In Newark".

The constant restlessness of the sounds demands unbroken attention, which is also necessary to decipher the dense, reflective lyrics, delivered in a fairly loose style somewhere between spoken word and recitation. All that effort, however, pays off in a tribute to Kaufman that stands out for its sheer singularity and confirms the creative depth of its author.

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29/01/2021