Look out this week for Elucid’s staggering 41-minute Interference Pattern, a sound collage or mixtape or whatever you want to call it which once again expands his sonic palette while serving as a recapitulation of sorts as the rapper uses samples and electronic treatments to glance back on his 2024. Through pitch-shifted vocals the mix takes its title from an observation, as the narrator recounts ‘how it started’ to some other interlocutor who is perhaps no more than a friend:
Have you noticed that every day is like every other day, somewhat . . . And have you noticed that every week is more or less like every other week . . . that every day has a relationship to four other days, and they are not the four days preceding it, they are scattered back through time, one of them may be six months in the past, one of them may be thousands of years in the past but each day is actually an interference pattern.
Following up on his stellar full-length Revelator, here he strings together some features from ‘Skopje’ the blistering ĆKSE opener to ‘I’ve Been Listening’ from Shabaka’s recent extended play Possession to ‘Doves’ the long and steadfast addition to We Buy Diabetic Test Strips, which now closes digital versions of the album as vocals by Benjamin Booker complement the Armand Hammer duo of Elucid and billy woods.
While the production which hovers over and tugs at each moment of Interference Pattern finds Elucid at his most gaseous, all of these snippets retain most of their original character which means that the mixtape lurches from free jazz squalls to cosmic interludes, foregrounding harp and flutes, or from marching band batteries to snatches of boom bap and smudged R&B as Interference Pattern also features oldies like the track ‘Oblivion Reflex’ with its beat from Jpegmafia, before that particular relationship turned sour.
Elucid sometimes knocks his vocals down a notch or adds layers of reverb, with ‘Skopje’ identifying his sound as ‘doom gospel’ while he broods ironically on his own business acumen and ‘Oblivion Reflex’ a cautionary tale about ‘Dope on these streets that you don’t buy, girls in these streets that you let walk by’Ā which identifies its prevailing theme as ‘power, domination and binaries’, while ‘Doves’ one of Armand Hammer’s most transparent cuts stands as both eulogy and celebration of life’s bittersweet sting.
There are other spoken word passages and samples culled from film, including the reinvigorated Martin Scorsese cult classic The King of Comedy where Jerry Lewis as the talk show host Jerry Langford tries to convince Robert De Niro as the delusional standup comedian and kidnapper Rupert Pupkin that he can trust him at his word. Amid the sprawl as the tape strays from finite song structures, Interference Pattern finds Elucid at the top of his game, serving as a fine kiss off to the year while he continues to stretch the canvas.
