Mike Ladd returns jagged and brief on Nonechosen

Mike Ladd's first solo album in over a decade arrives clipped and tense. Nonechosen is sixteen tracks, out November 6 on Backwoodz, and most of them are finished before the three minute mark. The sound is raw, abstract hip-hop, jagged at the edges, and it does not ask for your patience.

Ladd was born in Boston and spent part of his childhood in India and Zimbabwe; he has been based in Paris for years. Concept has driven the catalogue from the start: Easy Listening 4 Armageddon in 1997, Welcome to the Afterfuture in 2000, Nostalgialator in 2004, then two in 2005, Negrophilia, built out of Petrine Archer-Straw's book, and Father Divine on ROIR. He has also made several albums with the pianist Vijay Iyer. Nonechosen is the first solo record in ten years, and the frame has changed: there is no source text this time, just sixteen pieces, most of which end early.

It was made in Paris: recorded by Guillaume Jaoul at Studios Tropicalia, mixed by Scotty Hard and The Neve, mastered by Alexandre Debauchy, co-produced by Preservation, written and performed by Ladd. Backwoodz is billy woods's label, and the vinyl lands on Backwoodz Studioz, a home that will not try to round the record's edges for it.

The sequencing carries a lot of the argument. 'Son as Berry Gordy' opens, winks at Motown in the title and then declines to develop the joke. 'Breakfast', 'Lunch' and 'Dinner' are all present, spread across both sides and never in order, which is the record's one running joke and a fair summary of how it behaves: the meal arrives, the table is cleared, next. 'Murder Is' and 'Unsuicide' sit side by side late on side two, two titles that read as a pair and resist resolving into anything as tidy as a moral. The longest track is 'Unsuicide', at 4:19, which makes it the exception to the record's economy.

Seven of the sixteen tracks carry a guest, and most of those are quick. Mankwe Ndosi takes 'Rawbridge', No Surrender takes 'Stop Tape', Iron takes 'Toodles', Tom De Geeter takes 'Twenty Five', Aristide Gonçalves and Carol Robinson share 'Clip Check', Samuel Hirsch and Florent Berteau appear on 'Time Has', and Etenesh Wassie and Mathieu Sourisseau close the record on 'Last Chopper'. Three of those turns land under two and a half minutes, which is not much room to establish a voice and get out. The pressing carries a spoken word tag, and several of these pieces sit closer to speech set against a rhythm than to a hook riding a beat.

This is for the people who keep a shelf for the leftfield rap of the late nineties and early 2000s, and for anyone who follows Backwoodz for the label rather than for one artist. Play it on headphones, on a walk, with nothing else scheduled. If you need a chorus you can carry, the record will not give you one, and the short pieces will feel like interruptions. If you want the argument, go to 'Twenty Five' and 'Unsuicide'.

The economy costs it elsewhere. 'Clip Check' carries two guests into one of the shortest tracks here, so whatever happens in it has to happen at once. 'Lunch' works as a hinge between 'Stop Tape' and 'Time Has' and does not stand alone, and on a record this compressed a few of these read as openings that were never finished. A tighter running order, with the sketches cut, would land harder. As it stands the fragments accumulate into a mood, and a mood is not always a song.

That is where the 3.5 comes from: the right shape, a real discipline, and a handful of pieces that stop before they arrive. 'Unsuicide' and 'Twenty Five' show the other version, the one where Ladd gives an idea enough rope. What is left after 'Last Chopper' shuts the door is a ten year silence answered with sixteen short refusals. He did not come back comfortable, and he did not come back slow.

The tracklist

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