“Calm and Full of Chaos,” the first song from Neon Black — the latest release from the New Haven-based hip hop unit Sotolish — starts off with a sound like a siren from the future blaring over a dank, driving beat, provided by producer Delish Music.
“Calm before the chaos / stepping off the ghost / arriving to the seance / OK boss, more money, more layoffs / can’t collect the checks, all this water’s for the brainwash,” Sotorios raps, sounding like a man broadcasting from the sewers, keeping his head just above water, his audio equipment just dry enough to function. It all sounds like the duo is plugged into something urgent and real. Are we ready to hear the message?
“Dive into the neon-lit dystopia of Sotolish’s latest EP,” the liner notes read, “where razor blade speech blends with futuristic beats. Let the pulsating rhythms transport you to a techno-feudalist future as you immerse yourself in this getaway driver’s soundtrack.” The inspiration, of creating an album of transmissions from a dark future, is clear. Like a lot of good science fiction, however, it draws much of its force from its ability to reflect certain aspects of our present back at us.
The future Sotolish imagines is deftly drawn. In “Death to the Payphone,” Sotorios and guest Tonio Sagan trade verses: “Humans is on the fritz, get crossed off the list,” Sagan raps. “Plastic for dinner, black is the drink, walk out the void, fall off the brink,” Sotorios raps back, over a slinky, paranoid beat from Delish. “It’s automatic, it’s autocratic to start a panic,” Sotorios raps in the next song, “Ignore the Flies,” the title revealing itself in the next bar: “Bodies on the floor, ignore the flies.”
They’re imagining a future beyond our current political moment, when humans are in more obvious decline, from political chaos and repression, from environmental degradation. But it’s believable because it partakes so heavily of our current present — not simply what is turning out to be an especially unstable election season, but the deeper trends at work. Do you sense that the election is more a symptom than a cause? That there may be is a more fundamental sense, as W.B. Yeats put it a century ago, that “the blood-dimmed tide is loosed,” and “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity?” Then Neon Black may be an album for you.
There is catharsis, after all, in not feeling alone. Sotolish doesn’t have an answer, a solution, to the problems they bring up. Does anyone? But in their watchfulness and the attitude that pervades the music and the lyrics, there’s something like a mode of survival. As Sotorios raps, “don’t know what to say, I just take it day by day by day by day by day…”
Sotolish’s Neon Black is available on Bandcamp.