Hip-hop and you don't stop... ever
Article by Dan Eldridge, Photo by Casey Kelbaugh
Resonance, 11/01/2002
It's well past midnight at a cavernous Seattle rock club, and after a long evening of boring guitar bands, all but twelve people have spilt long ago. Onstage, the three members of the Newark-based hip-hop trio Dalek are creating some of the most intense sonic energy this side of a nuclear meltdown. Will Brooks (a.k.a. Dalek) squeezes the mic with both hands and rhymes in a Mike Patton-inspired hard rock shout. DJ Still moves his turntable's stylus not with his hands, but with the power of his own breath. The needle pops from groove to groove. Alap Momin, Dalek's electronic Svengali, (a.k.a. The Oktopus) is orchestrating the entire production from behind a Sony laptop, and with a pair of headphones tucked into one shoulder. None of them seem to notice that the room has cleared out almost completely.
"We don't need 500 kids [in the audience]," Momin says, explaning the band's all-energy-all-the-time attitude. "We were doing this in '98 in front of no one!" For the record, this is a band who considers their proudest moment a certain crowd-clearing gig in Milwaukee on an opening slot for De La Soul. "There were probably 500 people there when we started the set, and by the end there were about ten," Momin says, pleased with himself. "Kids were holding their ears, literally, and screaming and running out the door!"
After making a 12-inch single of experimental hip-hop for Matador called "Megaton," Dalek has created the angry album, From Filthy Tongue of Gods and Griots, for the appropriately weird Ipecac Recordings label, host to such well known noisemakers as The Melvins and Tomahawk.
After Dalek destroys the audience with its last song, the eight or nine people left wander towards the exit, looking slightly dazed. "Jesus Christ, that was insane!" says a guy loitering outside the men's room. "What the hell was that?" It's hard to tell if he means it as a compliment or of he's just surprised. The guys are already packing up their gear and mentally preparing for tomorrow night. After all, they have minds to blow and hip-hop heads to convert all over the country, and at twelve people a night, that's going to be one long, hard tour.
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