Bleep

First Digable Planets, then Shabazz Palaces, and now Knife Knights. Ishmael Butler’s latest project sees him team up with producer/composer Erik Blood for an LP of deep-fried psych-rap. 1 Time Mirage builds on the Funkadelic-style freakiness of the pair of LPs Shabazz Palaces released in 2017. Tracks like ‘Low Key’ and ‘My Dreams Never Sleep’ are lurching anti-rap tunes where the bad-trip instrumentals set Butler up nicely for a series of potent free-form lyrical vignettes. Even when the pair turn the stylistical dial towards hip-house (‘Can’t Draw The Line’) and neo-soul (‘Come On Let’s Go’) the record maintains an air of ghoulish strangeness. Imagine the more hallucinatory moments of Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly if they’d gone even deeper down the rabbit hole.