Bleep

Model Home, the duo of MC NappyNappa and Patrick Cain, have put in a shift over the past couple of years - between June 2018 and January 2020 the pair uploaded no fewer than fourteen mixtapes to their Bandcamp page. This new Disciples drop One Year rewards Model Home for their hard work, collecting eleven tracks from the first eight of those tapes on one LP.

One Year is a smoky, mysterious record, full of murky sounds and ghostly details. Its idiosyncrasy is fascinating, pulling you further in with each half-heard melody and muffled sample. The beats here would be unusual even if they weren’t ultra-lo-fi. At its most coherent - ‘Faultfinder’, for instance - Cain’s production sounds like a mutated version of old-school boom-bap being played on a tinny speaker. However, we frequently find Cain leaving more linear beatwork behind for industrial drum malfunctions, minimal synth explorations, grainy piano loops, or some general astral travelling.

NappyNappa accentuates the idiosyncraties of the beatwork. His vocals are often swimming against a sea of tape degradation here, something which gives them a kind of haunted quality. When he raises his voice he has something of JPEGMAFIA about him, but NappyNappa is just as likely to mumble or muse amid these strange sonic landscapes. The overall effect of Model Home is not unlike listening to a dubbed, bootlegged copy of Shabazz Palaces, Mix-O-Rap’s Eyes Of A Key, or even that excellent Bristol Pirates cassette released by Death Is Not The End last year.

Washington, DC duo Model Home uphold their hometown’s DIY spirit with One Year, a compilation of their grainy and ultra-leftfield hip-hop experiments.