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Story: Jack Foley
AUTOMATO marks the first hip hop artist on New York lavel, Dim
Mak, and an explosive introduction to boot.
The Brooklyn-based six-piece is comprised of Alex Frankel, Ben
Fries, Jesse Levine, Nick Millhiser, Andrew Raposo and Morgan
Wiley.
Completed in January of 2003, their forthcoming debut album was
produced by James Murphy and Tim Goldsworthy of the DFA.
The goal was to make an album that sounds and feels like the
sample based hip hop records they love, yet capture the un-hip
hop 'band' element of the group.
They not only succeeded at this, but surpassed their expectations
and the result is a testament to Automato's willingness to go
where other hip hop groups will not.
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Automato's interests and aspirations lie beyond the pigeonhole
of genre rap or underground hip hop and seem to branch into whatever
the fuck they were feeling that day.
In the process of making the album, the DFA and Automato were
never without a point of reference and everyone was listening
to as much music as they were recording.
It was common to find Nas' Illmatic, Can's Tago Mago,
Pixies' Surfer Rosa, and David Axelrod's Songs of Experience
vying for time on the studio's record player.
Automato's is an album that, like any good hip hop record, is
a product of its influences.
The vocals are somewhere between Cannibal Ox, Andre 3000, Jay
Z, and Ghostface, while the beats recall a mid-nineties Pete Rock
remix of Talking Heads covering Kraftwerk.
Points: Jumbo from The Lifesavers (Quannum- DJ Shadow's label
& crew) does a remix for Walk into the Light. Produced
by The DFA.
Needless to say, with so much talent behind them, it is little
wonder to find a lot of the music press hailing Automato as the
first essential hip-hop album of 2004.
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