Dälek
From Filthy Tongue of Gods and Griots

Griots, Bluesman, Jazzman, MC.

Four words, four rings of a single chain, which from Africa to America have geographically dragged the same social role: that of the one who keeps the memory of the community alive through storytelling; the storyteller who conveys the message in which the community sees itself reflected or, in more recent times, the "CNN of the ghetto", to quote Chuck D.

Dälek recovers the social value of old-school hip-hop, but in a less explicit way compared to their models: their verses remain more elliptical; loaded with metaphors and unresolved questions, vital in continuing to seek answers, despite the fatigue of the search expressed in gloomy and dark tones. The anger in the verses presses against the diaphragm and infuses the words with expressiveness, marking their flow.

On the musical side, in this second album from the group, Oktopus has no qualms about cannibalizing and exploiting psychedelic dilations, feedback, distortions, and white noise in a functional way for creating sound environments made up of dark, cinematic, and expressionist sounds, grafted onto obsessive and tribal percussion, sometimes slowed down to a crawl.

The twelve minutes of white noise in "Black Smoke Rises" at times evoke a radio seeking frequency, at others a radar scanning the route; the sitar at times in the foreground, at others relegated to the background like a music box in "Trampled Brethren"; rock reminiscent of the German psychedelic lesson from the 60s-70s, are just three examples arbitrarily extracted from the hour of music that forms a block of eleven tracks, uniform only in terms of quality level and originality of the proposed solutions, music capable of dilating time, that subliminally insinuates itself into the listener's mind to grow with each listen, even six years after its release.