Guest-Post: Elucid - The Bible and the Gun (2002) + Bond - Eminent Domain (2004)

 

Guest-post today from an overseas friend....

I suppose that once one is part of a cultural scene, one rarely asks the question why one does what one does. She reads the blogs, listens to the albums and playlists, ranks these albums and playlists, maybe writes reviews, sometimes she trashes other people's reviews and so on. What happens when she asks herself, why she does all that in the first place?

Does she seek the best this kind of human activity has to offer? Is it pleasure or emotions that she's after? Intellectual satisfaction? What about music (i.e.) that she only listens to because it is talked about? In this case her reason may consist in her interest to be able to participate in a conversation, rather than being in touch with greatness. Most likely there are many other cases one could mention or discuss. I want to simply pose the following question: Why do we want to listen to the first tentative steps of our favorite artists?

I'm talking about these abandoned old tapes, the neglected early works. Neglected by the fans, critics and the artist alike. The ones the artist himself isn't proud of, he may blush when you mention them at the end of a concert. The ones the artist never considered uploading on Bandcamp, even though they so easily could.

We know that those early works won't be amazing. We know they may even be bad. So do we want to experience bad art? Or maybe we want to experience our heroes not as these sacred entities that we and their music make them out to be? The entities that were able to create such works as Dour Candy or Valley of Grace like a rabbi shaping a golem out of clay or God forming Adam out of mud. Maybe we want to get rid of these "out of the blue myths" by gaining that one piece that lets us tell a humble origin story instead. Maybe we want a disenchantment of art.

Whatever it may be. Here are two such abandoned and neglected early works. Elucid's debut album from his pre-Armand Hammer and even pre-mixtape days and Backwoodz Studioz' first release: Bond's Eminent Domain EP. The latter features a lot of familiar noises that later got re-worked into Billy Woods' Camouflage and Bond's Golden Gunn, as well as exclusive songs like the opener "Harvest", which retroactively adds another great song to the already amazing catalogue of Billy Woods and Bond collabos: "Two ounces in my place but only one in the court case/ Interesting/ Justice got a fucking handscale/"

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