Back in 2023, From The Other (the creative bods behind Fat Out Fest) invited Charles Hayward and Will Brooks (AKA MC Dälek) to collaborate as part of their artist development programme Samarbeta. What started off as an improvised work, combining synth, drums, and samples, grew over the course of a week into a live performance with Brooks then taking the recordings back to his New Jersey studio to mix and add lyrics.
Deadverse Studio is the Garden State-based headquarters for Brooks’ main creative outlet – Dälek – a heavy as fuck hip-hop outfit that utilises walls of drones, alongside sampling and electronics, to slam home their politically-minded poetics. It’s also where Charles Hayward and Brooks first crossed paths around twenty years ago. Hayward, of course, is the sticksman behind the pioneering music of This Heat and Camberwell Now, alongside collaborations with a broad array of artists including Pat Thomas, The Raincoats, Crass, Laura Cannell, Bill Laswell, and most recently, as part of Abstract Concrete’s angular concoctions.
For a project born out of improvisation, HAYWARDxDÄLEK feels carefully plotted. It moves elegantly from slow moving drones, through eye-popping rhythms, into melancholic synthscapes, ending on a speed run that careens along like kids in shopping trolleys hurtling down a hill towards a busy motorway junction. It’s only when that punchy rhythmic energy kicks in, bristling with the fervour of uncertain expectation, that it embraces that unpredictable, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants spontaneity.
‘Breathe Slow’, equipped with deep beats and mangled melodies sped into a shrieked blur, is most reminiscent of Dälek’s hard-hitting low-end business. Here Brooks provides both reverence and humility in his pointed lyricism: “Take 75% of what I spit with some levity / I’ll burn my own fucking effigy” and, later, “This heat too deep / it keeps reaching further B.”
He isn’t pulling any punches. He takes shots at religion, at shallow behaviour, and kneejerk reactionaries. He shreds our media age, and on the penultimate track, unleashes the call to arms of “We exist within colonial design / the children chant free Palestine.”
Dark drones oscillate like rivers of circulating blood on opener ‘Increments’ before Hayward’s skilful hi-hat play enters the fray. His complexities masked by the lurching exchanges between snare and kick drum. This repeats across the record with seemingly simplistic rhythms, such as the stocky boom bap of ‘Asymmetric’ or the silvery percussion and tension-ratcheting toms of the second track, disguising subtle intricacies. The line “Between the word and the drum lies the whole balance” serves as both that latter track’s chorus and a manifesto for hip-hop.
The back-to-back instrumentals of ‘Salvage’ and ‘Antiphony’ allow a little more freedom with Hayward’s insistent rhythms tussling with Brooks’ flexing samples. The call and response of ‘Antiphony’ emerging between a didgeridoo’s puff-cheeked wobble and scratchy beads punctured with snare bursts and rim-shot percussion.
The most affecting moment on the album, however, arrives in the form of ‘Sojourn’. Singular notes, weighed heavy with the emotional clout of Basinski or Burial, leak out from a synthesised accordion as swelling melancholic tones struggle to the foreground. Growing in confidence and rising in urgency, Hayward’s drumming bobs and weaves like a majestic fighter springing into slow-motion shadow boxing action, seemingly telling a story of thick distorted waves mustered from some great oceanic depths. It is the sound of a great tsunami building. A tide of unimaginable magnitude rising up and up, unsettling trenches, lifting killer whales, and engulfing seagulls as it races towards the shore, only to break far enough out for its great churn to taper off to mere ripples by the time that the wash dribbles placidly over the sand. Leaving those strolling the beach utterly unaware of the narrowly avoided threat.
