Honour

HBK VOLUME I + II

Genre: ELECTRONIC

2 x Cassette Box

Boomkat Product Review:

PAN wait until the 11th hour - when most u lot have yr heads buried in a mince pie - to unveil the first-ish chapter in this brilliantly all-over-the-place project that may - or may not - involve ???

It’s an incendiary debut sermon from undercover operative Honour, who grabs tattered scraps of rap, blown-out rave, dissociated jazz, and algo-mangled drill, stitching everything into fresh shapes driven by DIY noise and crunchy electro-acoustic manipulations.

Who might Honour actually be, and does it even matter when the sounds are this turbulent? Clues are laid out like a breadcrumb trail on their labyrinthine inaugural dispatch, released as part of a cassette-only double header that initiates a bleakly cinematic open-ended narrative. Presented as a mixtape, it pays obvious tribute to hand-Xeroxed Chinatown boots, but it acknowledges the outsized influence of DatPiff and Livemixtapes on shaping a culture that went beyond rap, connecting the mainstream and underground in an anti-aesthetic bounty of unbridled free expression.

We open on a blurry haze of pistol clacks, piano stabs and barely-audible chatter - a space that feels familiar but defiantly current: serving dream dust that's mined from tweaky '90s R&B, jiggy rap, and the bits of the rave continuum that haven't been completely rinsed by Goldsmiths interlopers, muffling it all under thick blankets of half-heard vocals and abstract noise. Beats are slowed to a Houston crawl, spliced with dizzy loops; soul and disco cuts are forced thru ferric saturations and weaved into nice 'n sleazy chipmunked day-zero garage; trip-hop is reformed into baroque, cavernous neo-trap, driving us into darker, more politicised ends.

The second tape is more solemn but simultaneously more euphoric, skewering feeble landfill ambient with politically locked-in satirical cinematics, industrial drones, and shredded hoover bass. The opening moments sound as if they've been snatched from a melodramatic Western, stretched and reshaped to fit Honour's satirical expression. We're directed into delirious euphoria that handily swerves the expected "power ambient" factory, infusing noise-grated drones with bluesy nostalgia that sounds like a whisper from the past.

Splicing extended experimental jams with rugged drumwork, sirens and street-scene chaos, Honour saves the most startling deployment for the B-side, coming out with 'Untitled (trukfit)', a lengthy weightless noise subtraction that's so subtly affecting you might not even realise it at first. Made up of gnarled feedback and screaming noise but turned down to a hoarse crackle, it transcends entry-level modes of experimental music and reinforces a message that permeates every distorted kick and echoing squeal on the record: this is our house, and we're gonna do whatever the fuck we want.

Unmissable, and fucking immense.

2 x Cassette Box (9)

*Warehouse find* Edition of 100 copies // Two separate tapes packaged individually. Cones with a bundled download of Volume II, Volume I is tape-only.

Play All 2 x Cassette Box (9)