After his solo albums Le Bienheureux, Freedom and Paradise For All, Guts was convinced that a merry band of rappers, jazz players, soul men and soul divas should illuminate his albums, so he crossed the Atlantic with his MPC tucked under his arm. He has since branched out and collaborated in New York and Los Angeles to create an album for release in late summer 2014. For the time being, Guts is sending an EP to the front line to lead the way…
Recorded with vocals by Lorine Chia, a Cameroon-born singer who moved to the United States when she was six, the title track Open Wide sends out a soul statement. With its heavy beats, enlightened by string arrangements, Open Wide will always have a particular flavour for its producer and performer, for on the day it was recorded, 5 December 2013, Nelson Mandela entered history for good and involuntarily became the main inspiration for a track that is exclusively dedicated to his memory.
Offering a masculine counterpoint to such feminine subtleties, Quelle Chris and Denmark Vessey, both straight off the Motor City assembly line, gatecrash the strictly hip-hop ping-pong of The Forgotten. On this light and minimalist production, the deceptively dismantled beat loops like a misfiring engine, which the rhyming duo clog with a flow that fools around with the accelerator and the brake.
These two vocal tracks will definitely be on the album (along with their no-vocal, purely a capella versions), but Guts has also written two others that will have no life beyond this EP. Two instrumentals featuring only samplers, drum machines, expanders and other consorts.
The first, The Only Thing I Have, was recorded in two days and stored away on the MPC just before Guts left for Paris to do the mixing. Keyboards take the lead under the crystalline, celestial notes of a Fender Rhodes, forming a basis for vocal loops lifted from a film score by Argentine composer Luis Bacalov.
There are keyboards on the second too. The intriguing, cosmic Moog synthesizer sample on Fuck The Luxury Life, I Want A Dream Life sketches out nostalgic, dream-like visions, while the metronomic beat seems to count down the seconds to each snare-drum snap.
Open Wide is a calling card, an aperitif, a prelude – merely a first taster of an adventure whose long version will be released in September 2014.
Codename: Hip Hop After All.
