I feel like we’ve been down this road recently, announcing something for Max P, aka Black Zone Myth Chant, aka High Wolf (which you probably know him best as), aka Black Zion Mystic Chant (as you will now know him as, at least for the moment), aka many other things on his label Winged Sun, because you just CAN’T PIN DOWN MAX P. Oh, and by the way, all hail the return of Winged Sun! Max is reviving his label after something like six years, following Iibiis Rooge’s Life in a Bloodcell, catalog number WSR21, which, yes, also happens to be a project of Max P. I’m telling you, dude is EVERYWHERE.
Where was I? Oh yeah, we were talking about the announcement of the last BZMC album, the stupendous Feng Shen, like a minute ago, and we are hot on Feng Shen’s heels with more BZMC music, because it is 2018 and we deserve this without feeling bad about ourselves. Now, though, Max throws us a bit of a curveball, warping the abstract tribalisms and hip-hop-from-beyond-the-event-horizon-of-a-black-hole into dancehall and dub fantasies, all while retaining his singular bizarro-world quirks. You can take the Zone and Myth out of the boy, changing them to Zion and Mystic, but you can’t take the boy out of the Zone Myth! That’s a saying, right? And one that makes sense?
All these tunes were cut live in studio, so the takes you get appear here pretty much how they were laid to tape. All of them are dank and humid, heavy with gravity. And, thankfully, the focus on dub/dancehall is a natural fit within the BZMC oeuvre, as if it’s merely an extension of Max P’s ethos but in a slightly altered direction. The curveball is more of a hanger-and-banger, not a sharp 12-6 drop.
And, funnily enough, in a recent IRL encounter with Supereditor C Monster, during which I was roundly rebuked for my casual disregard of TMT rules and general freewheeling wild-card-ness (I’ll never change!), our conversation landed on reggae music, which we both admitted didn’t tickle our fancy all that much. But C — this message is for you: do not be frightened of Black Zion Mystic Chant. It might be the gateway drug to a whole new fantastic universe.
(Maybe not, though — I think I’m going to stop here myself.)
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