producers: automator

guests: mr. lif, mc paul barman, sean lennon, beans, prince paul, peanut butter wolf, scott harding, others.

A while ago, when people asked other people how the year 2000 will look like, predictions included flying cars, movies with smell, cured illnesses and possibly the first colony on mars. The year 2000 came and well, without the paradigm changing hoopla a lot of people have were hoping for. Maybe that's why Del, Automator and turntable wiz Kid Koala step into the time machine to see what happens, once the calendar says, that we woke up on January 1st, 3030. And while we can't give many well grounded predictions about such a far away future, one thing is for sure: 3030 will sound frickin' dope.

Case in point, "3030", straight up one of the best tracks of the year 2 triple 0, especially due to the magical Automator production, that combines a choir with steal guitars, usually associated with Hawaii or KLF's "Chill Out". This is the type of goose bump music that hip hop has to elaborate on. This is, on a scale of 1 - 10, a 13! Del, the man behind the mic, uses this track to introduce the whole cookbook, when he calls this the "perfect blend of technology and magic" and goes "now we just boarded on a futuristic spacecraft / no mistakes black, it's our music we must take back". Man, it's hard to recover from such bliss, but we got to and check out the humorous "The Fantabulous Rap Experience", before the previously available "Things You Can Do" appears. This is followed by the starfield duck game of "Positive Contact". The chorus is sliced by Koala, who through the album remains surprisingly in the background. The beat pumps forward, with the armed lyrics by Del, shoot like laser beams, finding the target with careful tenderness. Another skit made interesting by a whole bunch of guests, like Beans or Mr Lif, called "St. Catherine St." takes us to the other 12" cut, "Virus". While chewing on a golden apple, Del goes after anarchy, plotting "I wanna devise a virus / to bring dire straits to your environment / crush your corporations with a mild touch / trash your whole computer system and revert you to papyrus".

The way how Del's voice gains loudness, the way the beat sneaks up behind you, carrying you away like a flood, "Upgrade (A Brymar College Course)", gets you on it's side like a ferry. And "upgrade your gray matter, cause one day it may matter". You will not use it on "New Coke", another skit, that again humorously entertains, but does not blow you away. However, the sweet melody of "Mastermind" is magic, like a panflute tune played during Zelda. Monstrous strings and small hints at how detailed the scratching is kept, makes us give this another couple of thumbs up. It's not obvious if the flow of the album is interrupted again with "National Movie Review". But it's over quick enough, and it's appealing enough to not make us bother. More easy to miss turntablism can be found on "Madness", that's complete with a singing voice sample and meaningful and critical Del rhymes, like "sell your Marlboros and car insurance / put niggas on the moon and can't pay for your burdens / I smoke herb and rock a turban / meditate on the world and what's occurring / a lot of white boys like the style and copy / dig in something deeper and you'll peep that we're not free". This is melancholic and sad, and this takes us to the Paul Barman featuring "Meet Cleofis Randolph The Patriarch", who gets the chance to rap over a dope and chopped up collage.

But Automator also hooks Del up properly with "Time Keeps On Slipping", a combination of forefrantic drums, and an unproperly credited dood singing the hook. After another excellently produced interlude, with someone Dutch or Scandinavian, giving us "The News (A Wholly Owned Subsidiary Of Microsoft Inc.)". We find ourselves in the middle of the strings heavy "Turbulence (Remix)". These orchestrations are acting as a real time cloud building, that circle a fire like witches at walpurgisnacht. A revisited interlude ("The Fantabulous Rap Extravaganza Part II") paves the way for the story telling "Battlesong". Our hero then does "Love Song". This is as jazzy as it gets, with Del talking and commenting his dueling in some intergalactic dimension. Taking a classic break, combining it with hunting or college horns, Sean Lennon is singing the chorus and Del uses "Memory Loss" to rhyme "my town is founding fathers of the Black Panthers, we provide answers / you don't wanna believe then y'all are some blind bastards / they got you set up real good your neutralizing / industry rising while energies reclining / niggas think I'm whining, but I really don't give a shit / cause everybody's dying but y'all think that's the end of it / that's why it's so easy to be a Benedict / or imitate cause they wouldn't teach you algebra when you was eight / no you're forty-eight and you hate children".

The album then ends where it began, or returns to a practicing or setting the initial spark session, with "The Assmann 640 Speaks", and finally our brain can breathe out again, it having had to soak up more creativity than witnessed on the bigger sum of other 'out theres'. And so it's plain and simple: let this grow on you, give it time to ripe. Chill on that apple juice and wait until it miters. Alcohol will form, and the juice will become intoxicating.