Since their inception, lo-fi experimental group/art project
Hype Williams have been one of the underground music world's most inscrutable entities. Their string of cryptic recordings, videos, and press statements has always seemed purposefully confusing, and despite the amount of praise their records have received, nobody's ever come to a concensus as to whether their work is legitimate or an elaborate act of trolling.
Hype Williams has been referred to as a "relay project" overseen by an individual named Denna Frances Glass, and while
Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland were behind the project around the beginning of the 2010s, the duo branched off into solo ventures and announced that they were no longer involved in 2013. Following a few mysterious digital releases attached to the
Hype Williams name in 2016 and early 2017, the project surfaced on Big Dada with full-length
Rainbow Edition (as well as a non-album piece titled "Kathy Goes 2 Haiti," a minute-and-a-half of blaring, discordant loops stacked on top of each other). Sonically, the album certainly resembles a
Hype Williams product, from the logo of a cat-and-dog peace sign to the preset synth sounds, canned beats, and crackly fidelity (which seems to get deliberately muddier around track seven, as if they decided it didn't sound junky enough and threw a switch marked "sub-demo quality"). The album is every bit as inchoate and meandering as any typical
Hype Williams release -- it runs to 20 tracks, many of which are short fragments of beats which quickly fall apart. A few tracks feature samples which touch on racial issues ("#Blackcardsmatter," intro track "Madting") but seem to let the tension of the synth strings and sluggish rhythms carry at least as much of the emotional weight as the messages themselves. On "The Whole Lay," a
James Ferraro-esque computerized voice pleads "Why are you keeping me? I wanna know" over a queasy, hobbling beat and chime sounds. "Ask Yee" features a more blown-out trap beat pattern and a cautious sample of a woman wondering if she should trust the guy she's been talking to.
Rainbow Edition has its gripping moments, but its amateurness can be grating, and something about it just doesn't hold together. The voices and personalities of
Blunt and Copeland are missed, but it seems like the point of the album is partly to challenge fans who are used to their presence. Anyone who missed
Hype Williams the first time around should start with any of the group's early albums rather than this, but there's no guarantee that they'll make any more sense. [
Rainbow Edition was also released on LP.] ~ Paul Simpson