Alongside the roaring Harlem rapper Vado, Rhode Island native AraabMuzik has been one of the key figures in the re-emergence of Cam'ron, Dipset's language-bending figurehead. After a long period of complete disappearance, Cam's been going through something of a comeback lately, aided in large part by tracks like Araab's punishing "Get It in Ohio". Araab's work for Cam, and for other freelance clients, sounds dollar-store cheap but knife-edge tense; it reminds me of Steve Jablonsky's score for Friday the 13th. He makes ferocious, diamond-hard gangsta rap beats with a pervading sense of dystopic anxiety. Araab's sense of vision comes through even more strongly in the web videos he's been releasing, in which he shows off his MPC virtuosity and slices up samples of, oh, say, Cannibal Corpse. Like fellow underground rap visionaries Clams Casino and DJ Burn One, Araab makes freelance beats that hint at a fully developed personal aesthetic. And like those guys, he's now striking out on his own, making instrumental music that brings that aesthetic to the forefront.
Electronic Dream is Araab's first commercially available album, but it works more like a collection of remixes. Rather than creating his own tracks from scratch, Araab spends his debut album dismembering a series of cheesed-out hairgel-house superclub anthems: DJ Nosferatu's "The Underground Stream" on "Underground Stream", Jam & Spoon's "Right in the Night (Fall in Love With Music)" on "Golden Touch", Starchaser's "So High" on "Feelin So Hood". This is, to put it mildly, an unexpected direction for Araab. With a little bit of Googling, you can find plenty of online screeds from fans frustrated or even enraged at Araab for making an album based on this music, or for dishonoring his sample sources by leaving large pieces of these tracks unchanged while neglecting to properly credit the original producers. But Araab's changes, relatively minor though they may be, turn a sound built on populist uplift into something darker.
It's tough to imagine the tracks on Electronic Dream getting any play in any dance club in the world, and it's virtually impossible to picture anyone rapping over them. Instead, this album is a genre unto itself-- ominous future shit that creates an atmosphere but never bleeds into the background. Araab's snare-hits resonate like eye-punches, and his drum-programming is pure, unrelenting rap shit. But he's applying that sensibility to songs where the melodies shine even when Araab's using a screaming sound effect as part of the rhythm track. The end result is a truly weird little album-- something at once anxious and euphoric.