ILL-Sugi :: G I Z A

Discovering new artists used to mean going to a music store and thumbing through racks of compact discs, walls of tapes and crates full of records. I know, “Shut up boomer.” Well you can say what you want but I miss that visceral experience of browsing to find something good, and the number of places where you can do that continues to dwindle. The world has collectively moved on from physical media and the mere act of wanting to own the music you listen to in a form you can hold is “retro.”

ILL-Sugi’s “G I Z A” immediately strikes me as the kind of find I would have enjoyed best that way. The really good record stores would have a listening station where you could put on a pair of headphones and pop in a copy of something to preview it. These days our fear of coronavirus type diseases means no one would share a communal pair of anything stuck in or around your face, but back then we simply didn’t give a fuck. A track like “Wrekin Shop” would have had me nodding my head to the beat, eyes closed, oblivious to the stares of other customers. It’s got that good good Pete Rock vibe that I dig for about the first minute, then Sugi changes everything and throws in a Biggie “So you wanna be hardcore?” sample. It’s like two different songs for the price of one.

“rocking chair” only had 41 views when I browsed through the post-modern dusty piles of digital media. There’s no good reason for it to be that low. This is a producer clearly schooled in the ways of James Yancey. He lets the samples breathe. Things are chopped apart and reassembled. Elements come, go, stop and interrupt themselves. It’s a pleasure to come across Sugi’s style. Whether or not he works with rappers or other musicians is irrelevant to the fact he’s got a keen ear for what works. “U promise” knows how to take just a few seconds from a bigger composition and milk those notes. I can picture Sugi tapping away at MPC pads as I listen and it’s a pleasant visual.

“G I Z A” is available on multiple platforms so there’s no reason for it to languish in obscurity. It’s also not a release that will burden your ears as it clocks in at just under 15 minutes. Somehow it feels twice as long, but that may be because I tempted to repeat it the moment I’m done. It may be Sugi’s crime that he reminds one of so many other producers that he didn’t get that “next big thing” moniker from some local newspaper, then use that to get a local buzz outside of his home town, and so on and so forth. I’ll venture to say imitation is the sincerest form of art and not just flattery. If the worst thing I can say about ILL-Sugi is “he reminds me of other people that I like” then it’s an easy recommendation.