Kyle Ellison rejected your invitation to play candy crush.
“I’m just trying to show you where I’m coming from,” says Sam Baker of his new album, “I’m not about futuristic spaceship beats, just straight forward hip-hop.” It seems like Samiyam has been fighting this battle for years, watching as his head-nodding rap joints are filed under abstract descriptors. Perhaps it’s been the lack of any actual raps on his records to play obvious signifiers, it could be the label affiliations with Brainfeeder and Hyperdub, or maybe it’s just that no other hip hop producers sound quite like him. Similar to someone like El-P, Samiyam’s taste in rap is as classic as it comes, yet his music winds up sounding like the future.
Now, usually I’d say fuck a genre tag, but the rap lineage running through Wish You Were Here helps to cement its appeal. If El-P’s sparse, percussive beats take cues from 80s pioneers Ced Gee and Rick Rubin, Samiyam jumps in a decade later with stretched out visions of 90s boom bap. He’s playing from that same drum kit – all dusty kicks and snapping snares – but the elements have been deconstructed and spaced out with eerie synths and potent low-end. Samples are drawn from familiar sources too – there are soul and disco records in the mix with undertones of martial arts (‘Stuff’) and Hollywood mob movies (‘Italy’), yet nothing sounds tired or basic.
Samiyam adds a few vocal cuts this time as well to further establish his environment, featuring verses from Evidence, Alchemist and even a few of his own. Listening to Sam rap it’s a wonder that he hasn’t done it more often, demonstrating his capability to knock out punchlines that hit as hard as his snares. On ‘Panda’, for instance, he offers: “If you don’t like me, don’t let it get to be an affliction / fact is – your sister loves me, your mum listens and grandma’s writing me fan fiction.” Elsewhere he’s having fun referencing Seinfeld and quality hams, applying the same pastiche of the album’s artwork to his lyrics. Of course, Samiyam is still a producer first and foremost, but he delivers his best lines with a laugh as if to say, ‘I don’t even do this and I still write better than you.’
Even so, he’s right not to indulge too much, keeping his bars admirably brief so as not to distract from his sonic goals. The album is more of a refinement of Sam Baker’s Album than a complete overhaul, carrying over many of the same ideas but with subtler bass sounds that give the rest of the palette room to breathe. Piano and strings are allowed to lead songs as on ‘Hummus’, ‘On a Limb’ and ‘Italy’, rather than being continually gazumped in the mix.
Decisions like this leave Wish You Were Here as Samiyam’s most recognizably hip hop record to date, but he’s still tugging at the genres blueprints. A beat like “Snakes on the Moon” is not so distant from something Roc Marciano or Ka might rap over, but then, those guys too are playing with the idea of what constitutes a rap beat. This, I suppose, is the point, it’s not that Samiyam can’t recognise the differences between his own beats and, say, Pete Rock’s, but on Wish You Were Here he’s trying to show us the similarities.
