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Having
grown up on hip-hop's collages, indie-punk's bedroom DIY-isms
and the beat fantasias of electronic composers, John Hughes
(a.k.a. Slicker and the artist behind Chicago's Hefty Records)
has grasped something most others haven't in his knitting
together of something old and something new. For Hughes, the
common chord on We All Have a Plan, Slicker's fourth album and a
pan-global, soul-jazz masterpiece made out of bits and pieces,
is elemental and spiritual. "Honest" and "organic" are words
Hughes uses repeatedly to describe the joyful digitalia of his
blueprint. And in the wake of similar cut-and-paste excursions
by kindred spirit colleagues, We All Have a Plan smuggles modern
electronics away from indie-techno dilettantes and overcrowded
dance-floors, back to the timeless land of song. It has taken
the 27 year-old Hughes a while to return here, though his
creative life has been driving him in this direction all along.
From the childhood daze of a backseat imagination --"In my
parent's car on the highway, I was making beats timed to each
light post we'd pass" -- through an adolescence filled with
Kraftwerk, Yello, Herbie Hancock, and Grandmaster Flash,
futuristic music was always John's wellspring. The collaborative
voices and jazz tones you hear throughout the record belong to
soul, jazz, funk and Afro-Beat music's forgotten heroes.
Legendary Motor City funk-jazz cats Phil Ranelin and Wendell
Harrison illuminate the laid-back funk collage of "God Bless
This Mess, This Test We Pass" and its reprise "Straight Mess,"
and add lift to the downbeat jazz of "Village Plate Dub."
Vocalist Khadijah Anwar, once a 14 year-old soul wunderkind for
mid-'70s funkateers Sugar Hill, shines on the Zapp-like
electro-funk of "Knock Me Down Girl" Also appearing on the title
song, and throughout the Plan, is Dan Boadi, a Ghanaian vocalist
residing in Chicago, who Hughes estimates affected the album as
much as anyone.
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