• artist: eman­cip­ator
• album: safe in the steep cliffs
• label: inde­pendent
• genre: organic beat­making
• street date: january 19^th, 2010
• web­site: eman​cip​ator​.band​camp​.com
• rating: 4.5 out of 5

as prom­ised, here is a review of emancipator’s offi­cial sopho­more effort “safe in the steep cliffs”. the web­site has been get­ting a lot of search hits for leaked copies off tor­rents and down­loads for this album, so it looks like there’s a good number of people out there who are inter­ested in good music. but you guys really shouldn’t try to find free copies of this album. you need to buy it. it is only $10 on his web­site, and he is more than gen­erous with his music by streaming all of it for free. with that said, i waited a few days before reviewing this album, and as you can see on my last​.fm, its been playing non-​stop since i pur­chased a copy off of his web­site. i knew that if i reviewed it right away, i’d only be able to say good things about it without really giving it a crit­ical out­look. well, a few days have passed and i still can only say good things about it.

are you a fan of turntables? as a huge hip hop head, i’ve always been more about the beat­makers than the emcees. i love tal­ented djs and pro­du­cers like ant from atmo­sphere, dj krush, rjd2, block­head, rob the viking from swollen mem­bers, dj premier, dan the auto­mator, cut chemist, among many, many, many others. but as much as they could put a beat together, they couldn’t string together a melody to save their lives — mostly because they never needed to. eman­cip­ator has filled that huge void in the dj/​producer scene: beats with melody. and a lot of old­school heads are going to scoff at him being labeled hip hop, but he’s not going to care because he’s making music nobody else can even touch right now.

i remember back when i was 16 or 17, me and my friend joe were up-​to-​no-​good drug-​abusing teen­agers. we would take shrooms and then go on mys­tery adven­tures out in his back­yard where there was a patch of marsh­land with tall grasses and fallen trees — a great place to get lost in when you’re gripped by the psilo­cybin. i remember when we finally man­aged to make our way out of the woods and back into his house and he put on some infected mush­room track, and i’d be freaking out at my face melting in the reflec­tion in the mirror. i have a feeling that if eman­cip­ator was playing, the exper­i­ence would have been a lot less ter­ri­fying because let me tell you: this is tight beat­making at its finest.

when elec­tronic music first came into the fore back in the 1970s, its unique­ness was based on the fact that it did not sound like any tra­di­tional instru­ment. syn­thes­izers would make bleeps and bloops. it wouldn’t sound like a guitar or a piano or a violin. today, things have come full circle, and its almost impossible to dis­cern an elec­tronic loop from a hand-​plucked guitar. eman­cip­ator falls into this cat­egory as a bed­room musi­cian who takes his com­puter and crafts digital music that has a hard time con­vin­cing you it isn’t 100% organic.

a lot of music rags who happen upon this disc are going to have a lot of trouble clas­si­fying. hell, i’m one of them. that’s why i just make up genres and hope that you under­stand what i mean. eman­cip­ator (real name: douglas appling) is just one of those guys that takes a lot of dif­ferent ideas and squishes them together into an eth­ereal mix that takes you onto a journey into some weird and won­derful world of fantasy. if his first effort, soon it will be cold enough, can be clas­si­fied as oper­atic, then this effort can be described simply as cinematic.

since his time in japan pro­moting his debut, eman­cip­ator has come back and his sound has grown up. clear are the influ­ences of the nujabes and the hydeout col­lective — rolling jazzy melodies put up against loungey bass­lines, but lets throw in oper­atic vocal samplings with orches­tral strings, and violins and gental guitar riffs, and piano keys offering a per­fect pitch, and a del­ic­ately pro­grammed drum machine to keep the music’s heart beating, not to men­tioned synthed up phasers with reverb turned all the way up to create a mys­tical feeling as you journey from track 1 to track 14. there aren’t a lot of gear changes in the album, and when eman­cip­ator says that it is the “tightest” album he has ever pro­duced, he isn’t lying, as each track flows into the next.

fans of jazzy turntable stal­warts like dj cam, bonobo, and block­head will not be dis­ap­pointed. i’m going to go out on a limb and say that they’ll enjoy a listen to eman­cip­ator more because while the music is has the same the soul, there’s a much more dynamic feel to it. because this album is built on tex­tures. one layer gently laid upon the next, growing into a chorus. do you remember the volk­swagen jetta wed­ding com­mer­cial scored to j ralph’s one mil­lion miles away? that is this album. throw in a touch of tribal ele­ments remin­is­cent of del­erium, dead can dance, and enigma, and you have a total package for élite-​level instru­ment­a­tion and musical arrangement.

here are his tour dates in sup­port of the album (as listed on his website):

Feb 2 Crown Hall — Men­d­o­cino, CA w/​Bassnectar
Feb 3 Arcata Theatre — Arcata, CA w/​Bassnectar
Feb 4 McDonald Theatre — Eugene, OR w/​Bassnectar
Feb 5 Rose­land Theater — Port­land, OR w/​Bassnectar
Feb 6 Showbox SoDo — Seattle, WA w/​Bassnectar.
Feb 22 Wilma Theater — Mis­soula, Montana w/​STS9
Feb 25 The Depot — Salt Lake City, Utah w/​STS9
Feb 26 House of Blues — Las Vegas, Nevada w/​STS9
Feb 27 Mar­quee Theatre — Tempe, Ari­zona w/​STS9
Feb 28 Rialto Theater — Tucson, Ari­zona w/​STS9
Mar 3 New Earth Music Hall — Athens, GA
Mar 4 90 Proof — Knoxville, TN
Mar 5 412 Market — Chat­tanooga, TN
Mar 6 12^th & Porter — Nashville, TN
Mar 7 Ken­tucky Downs — Franklin, KY
Mar 19 Kin­etic Play­ground — Chicago, IL
Mar 20 The Loft — Min­neapolis, MN
Mar 27 — Harper’s Ferry — Boston, MA