Hip-Hop Has Its Beethoven

The following article was published on Applesauce Magazine before the online hub's domain was canceled and yet to be renewed. I have republished the article on my own site for my own sanity. 

I am typing this out with one hand navigating the keyboard and one hand holding a finger up my nose. Yes, this is unsanitary, and should anyone walk into my room to catch me booger-fingered and red-handed, I would feel rightly embarrassed. But should this person ask me, “Why? Why do you do this, Colton, you disgusting pig?” I would ramble to them about an artist named Impossible Nothing, who has kicked more ass in a span of three years than many have kicked in the last decade. And yet, he is so obscure! I am bristling with excitement to give this man exposure as fast as possible — no time for Kleenex! “But…What makes this guy so special?” The person may ask. “What about this ‘Impossible Something’ guy is so important that you have to ramble without blowing your nose like a normal person?” To this, I would spew about a hundred points at assaulting speeds until the listener would run away in a panic. And, at such point, I would spew my words into this article instead.

Hip-hop has had no shortage of evolution in the last ten years. The experimental trio Death Grips fused rave music with digital hardcore; the rise and fall of songwriters Lil Peep and XXXTentacion brought the intimacy of alternative R&B with suicidal lyrics to birth the genre of emo-rap; trap music and “mumble rap” popularized by Chief Keef and Playboi Carti; and that’s still not even touching on Tyler the Creator, Run the Jewels, JPEGMafia, Danny Brown, Earl Sweatshirt, and Kendrick Lamar — each establishing in their own ways that the rap music of today is the bee’s knees.

But out of all the names above, none of them were my favorite hip-hop artists of the decade. Not even Kendrick. Instead, my choice would be Impossible Nothing.

You call me a madman! Well, to illuminate my madness, I’ve attempted to write a comprehensive guide to understanding his music.

By the end of this article, you should understand why my jaw hangs open at the fact that this dude even exists. There’s a video of critic Anthony Fantano dancing to his music here at 12:48, but other than that, Impossible Nothing has had close to no promotional exposure besides a handful of independent publications and word-of-mouth. HOW?

SECTION ONE – HOW

Born in Toscana, Italy before relocating to New York, producer and composer Darwin Frost (also known as D'Arcy) was a member of the hip-hop collective Skookum Sound System before he began uploading his personal material onto Bandcamp as Impossible Nothing in 2010. Then, in 2016, he released Phonemenomicon, the first of many albums that collect twenty-six tracks — each named after a letter in the alphabet — that are ten minutes apiece: adding up to four hours and twenty minutes. (And whether or not the “four-twenty” was intentional doesn't stop it from being awesome.) By 2019, he would release eleven more of these records, adding up to more than fifty hours of material. To put that in perspective, the average length of an album release is about 45 minutes, which are usually released in intervals of one or more years. So, Impossible Nothing released that amount of material 70 times in just three years — roughly 23 average-length albums per year. These are factory numbers, all just coming from one man.

I bet you already wanna drift from reading and go listen to his stuff yourself, right? I got you covered. I think the best introduction to his sound would be the first two minutes of his piece “K” (click the title). It showcases everything I’ll be talking about. The intro is a disorienting array of stuttering samples, making you anticipate some kind of beat drop, and when it arrives, it chugs away the abstraction and recontextualizes everything. As it progresses, so do the number of samples and glitched-out production gimmicks that populate every measure. By the two-minute mark, the collage is dismissed in favor of a soundtrack remix from Metroid, but notice how the basic beat itself stays consistent throughout the ten-minute runtime, all through such radical changes to the music beyond the Metroid segment.

In the most condensed terms, Impossible Nothing’s music doesn’t just have parts, it is coherently progressive. And the fact that it’s always instrumental confirms his projects as purely musical statements — no reliance on lyrical or rhyming merits, only his skills at production and composition.

Now obviously Impossible Nothing was not the first to use instrumental hip-hop as grounds for a musical statement: legends such as J Dilla and DJ Shadow were seminal to beatscaping. But I’ll shine more light onto Darwin Frost’s aesthetic so you can see what distinguishes him even among the legends.

One distinctive feature about Frost’s production is his maximalist volume density which compresses everything to be way, way louder than normal. It’s an amateurish approach, but I think the idea is so people can hear the music clearly no matter the device or speakers they are equipped with. And the music complements this well. His deliberately dense and jarring arrangements can be likened to that of Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew, simulating a sort of hallucinogenic claustrophobia. And yet he never deviates from a steady drum machine loop, keeping things hypnotic and even groovy despite how incomprehensible the layers upon layers can be. And this balance is exactly how Impossible Nothing maintains the taste of the hip-hop genre, regardless of how eclectic and experimental his sampling becomes, because ultimately, the beat stays consistent for dancing and freestyling, but the samples are changing channels.

So I guess this begs the question, what even is hip-hop, really? At least away from instrumental beat genres like EDM and DnB. And when is it fair to say that a genre may be distorted beyond recognition?

I ask because what makes an accomplished composer is how they not only show respect for the music, but also for the culture's history. And from my observations, Frost is a very tasteful student of hip-hop’s histories, fads, techniques, and clichés.

SECTION TWO — THE BEAT

Musically, hip-hop was first popularized as dance music — specifically, break-dance music. That’s why an MC (Master of Ceremonies) is there to instruct the listeners when to “get down” or “stick your hands in the air!” Before the emphasis on hip-hop was lyrical, it was physical: loud vibrations to stimulate the air for night clubs, breakdance battles, or workout routines.

Darwin Frost knew the different cultures of dance music from the past (the 70s disco era, early hip-hop in the 80s, the 90s techno era) and the present (the resurgence of house music in the 2000s, the trend of lo-fi beats to study/relax to in the 2010s) and studied the histories and developments of those styles, too. Modern house music would lead to more atmospheric varieties that would include vaporwave (a genre which we’ll touch upon later); the aesthetic of lo-fi textures in hip-hop would create a subgenre of “cloud rap” (what is essentially psychedelic or dreamy hip-hop); and fans of techno would eventually create trance music (a genre that became a meme with Darude’s “Sandstorm”).

And so we have Impossible Nothing tracks like “C” that closes the piece at 7:14 with soul samples accompanied by disco strings; or the techno bass that shrouds the background in “L”; the wintery chimes that would befit cloud rap at the start of “Q”; and the euphoric trance synth that picks up the climax at 6:04 for “J.” Each piece circles around rhythms and samples that are radically eclectic, but they never veer too off-course from hip-hop, because technically, all of these genres are hip-hop: they are different forms of dance music that hip-hop can form into through its rudimentary “dance” beats.

Another offshoot is drums & bass music, a hardcore form of dance music originating from rave scenes in the UK in the 1990s, which distinguishes itself through fast drum machines and heavy (and usually dark) synth basslines, but also employs the exploitation of drum breaks as opportunities for syncopated and/or polyrhythmic fills. This piece by Adam F is a good example, as the arrangement slowly generates its different parts, and we see how the spaces between each measure gradually fill with different additions of percussion that keep the pace of the music engaging and unpredictable.

Now, jump to 2003, when Dizzee Rascal, a rapper from the UK, took the nervous percussions and dark synth-lines of drum & bass and fused it with hip-hop to popularize the genre of grime. The syncopation was tempered down to be more predictable, but the general impact was a success in being danceable but also bizarre in its rhythmic style.

Enter Impossible Nothing, whose discography is littered with dark synth-lines, and whose “X” exercises bass and snare parts that subtly change the timing and beat number. Though its drums aren’t as busy as the Adam F piece, or as skittery as the Dizzee Rascal link, the sense of constant anticipation is there, teasing the listener with additions and withdrawals so that they’re riveted to hear another tiny change.

It could be argued that Frost’s glitchy execution of the sampling syncopates or engages in polyrhythms themselves, making the whole piece feel like a live DJ set. Impressions such as this of course tie back to the hip-hop art of turntablism, which we’ll talk about now.

SECTION THREE — THE SAMPLING

Sampling is the act of taking pre-existing audio and distributing its playback across a different recording. Ultimately any kind of sampling derives from the ancient experimental practice known as the sound collage — a technique that is self-explanatory in its title; dating as far back as 1928 when electronic composers would glue disparate ribbons of audio tape together to layer and contrast their different audial textures.

Now just as the term “sound collage” implies, sampling in hip-hop does not only refer to samples of music, but bare sound effects and incoherent noises as well. Sounds or excerpts from video games, movies, advertisements, speeches, and even nature recordings are sampled quite often, and Impossible Nothing employs them all. One type of sampling that Frost practices a lot in particular is a cliché of old school hip-hop, dubs of vocal catchphrases which may be remixed by a few turntable scratches (or some digital equivalent) just as Eric B & Rakim did for “Check Out My Melody” or Flavor Flav shouting “Show ‘em whatcha got!” at the start of Public Enemy’s “Louder Than a Bomb,” and as you may have noticed with Eric B & Rakim’s track, this may include effects of delay and panning for extra flair. Frost sticks to this trick almost religiously, as cohesion among the multiple sections of his pieces are illustrated sometimes by a line or sample being repeated and remixed throughout a single piece.

Many samples may also be “chopped and screwed,” which means they were edited into different speeds, pitches, or timbres. This technique ties to plunderphonics, a genre of music in which all parts are samples arranged into original pieces of their own (the most popular act of which being the Avalanches). A less complex variety is the “mash-up,” which are pieces made by the same means, but with the samples limited to specific sources. (These are most popular on YouTube, namely the Disney remixes by Pogo.)

Plunderphonics also led to one of the most popular forms of music on the internet, which is vaporwave, a genre that takes artifacts of music or sounds distinctly from the 80s/90s with applied audio distortions on everything to give it a glitched-up but dreamy quality. Parts of vaporwave can sound like purely dysfunctional CDs or warped cassette tapes, which adds a dimension of nostalgia for old technology in the respective decades from which the samples came.

Impossible Nothing’s sound could very well be described as plunderphonics pieces laced with a hip-hop beat, especially with tracks “M” equipped with a slowed-down and melancholic horn sample similar to that of the Caretaker. Impossible Nothing pieces could also be described as sound collages for that matter, regarding the parts that have no beat, where we may be left with sudden nature sounds (as at the end of “J”) or incomprehensible glitch noises. And vaporwave’s “dreamy quality” can be applied to some of Impossible Nothing’s cloudy beats (such as the wintery haze at the start of “Q”) and his samples and references to digital media from the 80s and 90s (including the music from Metroid on “K” and the short bit of Mario music on “X”) alluding to the same sense of nostalgia.

But let’s not wander too far away from the music’s urban relevance. Don’t forget that what brought the art of the sound collage to the streets — and therefore, the art of sampling — was the turntable.

As I said before, Impossible Nothing’s music seems like a wild DJ set, a turntablist running and scratching maybe five to six records at once. Thus it becomes the equivalent of turntablism in the digital age — only instead of turntables, performers use DAWs (digital audio workstations, like Audacity, Pro Tools, Fruity Loops, Garage Band, etc.) and Frost uses this to his advantage, capitalizing on the infinite samples he can throw into one file. And with the internet, there are infinite resources available to find them. So if you think about it, the extent of Impossible Nothing’s vision could not have been realized at any other time in history, which makes his approach the most advanced form of eclectic sampling yet available.

Furthermore, from an idyllic perspective, it could even be said that the wandering attention span of Frost’s sampling caters to the generations born with the internet. The media overload in web-surfing reflects the overload of layers in each beat, and the sampling from a limitless array of media simulates the archive of an internet browser. Impossible Nothing could very well be described as the sound of the internet, just as much as vaporwave, more than plunderphonics, and more than any sound collage; because the large library of samples is so chock-full of artifacts, references, ideas, art, and entertainment all compressed into an audio format — and all with a nice beat to boot!

CONCLUSION

The production, the beats, the samples… they all feed back into hip-hop, either paying tribute to the genre or embellishing their elements. Frost doesn’t just take hip-hop “back to its roots,” he digs his fist in the ground, yanks up a root and follows it to the farthest extremity: the beat’s stem to the history of dance music, the history of sampling stem manipulated into plunderphonics, and so on. In a way, Darwin Frost pulled from hip-hop’s past in order to futurize it; he took cues from the old school, then attended every other school in the districts nearby, amalgamated their lessons, and used his knowledge to intuitively mix the different compounds of taste to watch the chemistry. To Frost, nothing separates a piece of instrumental hip-hop from a beat-infused sound collage.

For newcomers, I hope all these concepts stay within you, so the next time you hear his work, everything clicks. That’s when the real fun begins, and you explore Impossible Nothing’s music yourself.

With Run-DMC, hip-hop had its rockstars. With Public Enemy, hip-hop had its political commentators. With Eminem, hip-hop had an outsider. With Kanye West, hip-hop had its equivalent of David Bowie just as Lil Peep was the equivalent of Kurt Cobain. And now, with Impossible Nothing, hip-hop has its Beethoven: a composer.