Hype Williams Hype

Sat drinking wine next to an unplayed copy of the new Hype Williams LP. Just waiting for my wife's 3 LP opera to finish... just on Side 6! I'd wearily glanced over HW articles last year but suspected them of being a post-Crystal Castles electro group with a trippy, hip-hop beat. Then, somewhere, I read a review that reminded me of the many turn-of-the-80s Cabaret Voltaire cuttings I've amassed. The journalism seems to not quite understand -is the piss being taken? Or is this some disarmingly laid-back spurt of cultural significance, the validity-bestowing context such epochal events require still terra incognito for most listeners? As with early Cabs output, like the wonderfully itchy 'Baader-Meinhof' or 'Do the Mussolini (headlick)', brilliance must be interpreted out of an initial feeling of 'Have I been done?' Similarly well-acquainted with the reefer as the Sheffield android-muggers, Hype Williams' YouTube tracks (all of which are collected here) are seemingly either irreverent sound-pranks created to fuck with your preconceptions or studiously constructed sonic artefacts bordering on oblique propaganda to the exact same end. That instinct drove me to search for this LP. My impulse to buy the thing came from the group's Fact Mix. My two over-riding passions these last three years (musically) have been Grime (Butterz curated 'future Grime' and old-skool radio-legends like Trim) and Norwegian Black Metal, especially Burzum and the swooningly diabolical Mayhem (sigh...). Apparently irreconcilable in everything but sound quality, Burzum and the Tinchy-Stryder-spawning-but-still-jaw-dropping Ruff Sqwad both rear their hissy sonic heads on HW's Factmix, much to my surprise. I was reminded of Richard H Kirk's love for both Kraftwerk and Funk-fusion-era Miles Davies -two, seemingly, polar opposites that somehow share a place in the ideological grey-zone of 70s pre-punk (a difficulty in some ways reconciled in Roxy Music, another big Cabs influence). Fertile ground for innovation, methnks. I've been saving my ears: no Hype Williams all week. Now I'm revving up for my first, partially-blind, first listen. Afterwards, I'm going to slam on Sound of Sheffield Volume 1 to compare. HW's elusive debut already whiffs of the Cabs' first, super-limited issuance (rereleased as CV 1973-4)...let us see.