Philly hip-hop producer WHY?Arcka has uploaded one of his strongest beats yet, the elegant dissection of rhythm and soul that is “Street Walkin’ (Gone).” The track has been entered in as Exhibit G at arckatron.bandcamp.com, his ongoing A-to-Z of abstract instrumental beats, deeply felt crate digging, and all around metric ingenuity.
As is WHY?Arcka’s mode, he takes a small slice of a pre-existing song — nowhere near as nanoscopic as would be an experiment in granular synthesis, but neither is it as reductive as a P. Diddy pop production — and inspects the fragment until it yields something akin to a funky piece of conceptual art.
The track opens with a quick loop, all rhythm and moan, a moan so sublimated it might be mistaken for a nuance to the bass line, which is exactly what it becomes as “Street Walkin’ (Gone)” takes shape. Then comes a smattering of guitar, hinted at before it’s allowed to be heard fully. And then the vocal, a tantalizing snippet of the song’s title. And then the whole thing goes into breakdown mode, even more spare than at the opening, a slim mash of beat and vocal, allowed to go about its own staunch business.
Forgive the play-by-play appreciation, but this review is really just mimicking exactly what WHY?Arcka himself enacts upon the sample at hand: teasing out the encoded beauty.
The excellent bandcamp.com interface provides its own proprietary mode of sharing and providing free download, encapsulated in this tidy widget:
Thanks for the reminder on WHY?Arcka’s project. I’ve already downloaded A through E, so obviously I need to go back and get the new downloads.
Yeah, the guy really has it. He and Diego Bernal are two of my favorites currently.