Video: Benzokai – “Identities Too Abstract”

The latest from Czech imprint Baba Vanga comes by way of Vienna/Budapest-based, Estonian born experimental producer Benzokai (previously Rin-La) who will christen the name with his album Identities Too Abstract this week. Musically the album can seem dark and spare, what I imagine being glossed as “abstract hip-hop” — an admittedly not unfair description, that does point toward some of the extended backdrop for most spoken word in pop-culture — though his lyrical interests and delivery seem more closely cut to an artist like Prince, or any number of others indebted to the broader wave of African-American “spoken word” in the 1960s. Benzokai’s tableau is similarly animated and in this case particularly by the contradictions it negotiates, with a personality that feels mostly exploratory and if anything deliberately loose, condensing layers of jazzy skronk and noise around the body of his vocal interjections. It’s a distinct delivery and orientation to adopt, one that I think adds as much now as it did then, to the extent that it tends to color otherwise prototypically urban forms with emotion and urgency — in Benzokai’s case, a cosmopolitan clot of melting, minimalist dark-wave. Despite embedded questions about drug culture I can’t shake the sense that in another context, he could as easily have turned his hand to stone-burning psych music. At times in Identities Too Abstract it may be a question of perspective whether or not he hasn’t already. Benzokai is at least undeniably a psychic explorer, and one with a unique and responsive framework for sounds.

Identities Too Abstract will be released digitally this week, and with a vinyl and cassette release to follow shortly after, via Baba Vanga.