Brooklyn's Sound-Ink Records

A lot of ink has already been wasted decrying the lyrical wasteland of today's mainstream hiphop; too many gangstas, non-ringing cellphones, car keys, ho's, etc. Nobody seems to have much of a problem with the sounds behind and between the words; why should they, when most production today lives up to the title of OutKast's "So Fresh, So Clean"? Crisp, often minimalistic, almost scientifically calculated to get heads bobbing and butts shaking, it emphatically gets the job done. So what if it can be kind of boring on its own? Even in the case of a fantastic single like the GZA's "Fame," where the MC flamboyantly lives up to his genius tag, the production?let's just call it the music?is simply a tasteful setting for the jewel within. In this case a high-carat diamond, in others a cubic zirconium. But what about the Neptunes? Without dissing their track record of hits, news to anyone who somehow hasn't heard it yet: the N.E.R.D. album sucked. It had one good song on it ("Baby Doll").

Contrary to the thrust of a recent New York Times article (which admittedly was about rock and pop, not hiphop), innovation today is not reliably coming to us from the folks at the top of the charts. As usual, anyone who cares about these things needs to listen to the output of smaller, lesser-known (but I won't call them underground) labels. Like Brooklyn's Sound-Ink Records, which is neither a hiphop nor an electronica label but a fusion of both. Their initial compilation, Colapsus, released several months ago (yes, before the Blade II soundtrack), featured "underground" hiphop folk like MF Doom and M. Sayyid alongside lyrics-free tracks by artists like U.N.I., Suphala and Mutamassik, not to mention collaborations between the two like Heat Sensor and Creature's "Human Error." Sayyid, by the way, turned in a track ("Good Friday") that's more aggressive and rhythmic than most of his stuff with Anti-Pop Consortium.

Label cofounder Nathaniel Gosman (who is also one-half of Heat Sensor) has no real problem with the IDM, or Intelligent Dance Music, label being used to describe what Sound-Ink is up to. "That's almost an ironic label at this point, like saying 'dude,'" he told me. "It's convenient." Gosman and Alex Threadgold (the third man behind the label is Matthew McDonald, aka Max Bill) say that their template for an electronic music label is L.A.'s Plug Research, home of Chessie, Dntel and John Tejada, among others. Sound-Ink's plans are ambitious?more or less straightforward hiphop releases followed up with avant-garde remixes of the same. They're attempting a kind of fusion, says Gosman: "but not in a murky ambient way. Each element should keep its own identity."

Many of the tracks on Colapsus do in fact sound murky and ambient, but in the sense of organic and atmospheric rather than sloppy or piecemeal. The sounds are always in the foreground, even on hiphop tracks that feature talented MCs like Philadelphia's King Honey. There's no attempt to dazzle listeners with games of pick-that-sample?instead, Sound-Ink's artists use fewer samples and imbue them with a worked-over quality, blending one to the other in a way that's both interesting to listen to and, on more tracks than not, truly danceable. You can hear the varied musical preoccupations of the label's principals coming together in a fruitful way, preoccupations that include jungle, hiphop, spoken word, Sun Ra, musique concrete and punk's DIY esthetic. The goal throughout remaining, as Threadgold says, overt accessibility with complexity beneath it. Another goal, according to Gosman, is "bridging noise and melody." Remember how noisy hiphop used to be without MCs yelling at you?

Accessibility is a relative term?some tracks on Colapsus, like the John Tejada/Divine Styler "Ataraxis," are a bit too hermetic, though Divine Styler's rich voice will always be a treat even when he isn't making much sense. Sound-Ink's releases have been reviewed positively in The Wire, not in Urb. Still, there's no sonic or musical reason why many of the artists here couldn't find a broad audience. Take King Honey. Also a visual artist (he raps about "moving from the second to the fourth dimension") who's done a Bahamadia album cover, Honey has a literate, even literary, yet still aggressive and bravado-fueled lyrical style that's subtly menacing. His "Motions" track has a muted menace about it, like a car prowling empty urban streets at night, and is in its own way much more convincing than any cartoon gangsta tale. Sound-Ink plans to release a King Honey 12-inch over the summer, and an album featuring Apani and Doom, among others, in the fall.

Doom just recorded an album for Sound-Ink under the name of Viktor Vaughn: Vaudeville Villain, also to be released in the fall. Before then Sound-Ink will put out some more Heat Sensor tracks and remixes and a remix by DJ Rupture, the amazing American-born DJ/producer currently living in Spain. If you want proof of accessibility, Heat Sensor and Mike Ladd were featured on Kurt Andersen's public radio show Studio 360. Ladd will also appear on an upcoming (mostly instrumental) Heat Sensor LP, along with Rodan. So the hiphop side of Sound-Ink boasts several well-established names, but it's the less-categorizable electronic artists that might even be more innovative and genre-bending: Timeblind's blurts and splutters, Max Bill's jungle on syrup spiced with campanile bells, U.N.I.'s "Swamp Thing," which melds a legion of croaking frogs with ethereal, wordless female vocals.

According to its founders, Sound-Ink is all about unexpected mergings and juxtapositions. Threadgold and Gosman are capable of putting an impressive theoretical gloss on everything they do. But their work doesn't need the gloss: the sounds speak for themselves. They're off to a good start. As Doom says on the Colapsus track "Monday Night at Fluid," "Watch out for the mild-mannered."