Consumer Guide Album

Mush Filmstrip (Frame 1) [Shadow, 2001]
Eighteen bites of the vinyl-friendly "downtempo instrumental" and/or "abstract hiphop" Mush Music label featuring precisely one artist in my recall vocabulary, Aesop Rock. Starts with three instrumentals faster and more content-conscious than was the illbient norm back when there was illbient. Since all are deeply funky in a DJ Shadow Attends Handsome Boy Modeling School kind of way, the rap tracks are like gravel folding into asphalt. And although the two acid jazz demonstrations shoulda stayed in Chi-town, the sax and Hammond B-3 moments later are just more displaced sonics in a waking dreamscape of nothing but. A-