Guerilla Toss founder Peter Negroponte and post-punk/noise veteran
Nick Forté are the co-conspirators behind
Dawn People, a patchwork collage of thrift-shop vinyl samples, live instrumentation, and tape smudge. Almost immediately, the project's funky breakbeats and anything-goes approach to assembling found sounds recalls the '90s glory days of postmodern sampladelia:
Beck's magnum opus
Odelay, Ninja Tune flagship acts like
DJ Food and
Up, Bustle and Out, Shibuya-kei innovator
Cornelius, etc. However,
Dawn People tend to mangle their samples a bit more, coming a bit closer to the disjointed whimsy of their DFA labelmate
Eric Copeland. Their tracks tend to be rough, gritty, and disorienting, with several contrasting sounds crammed into the mix, such as the choppy, distorted drums thudding underneath the smooth, gliding guitars of "Get Life." The slower tracks, such as "Inner Refuge" and "Eurybath," have more of a grainy haze to them, recalling
Tobacco or
Odd Nosdam. In lieu of proper lyrics, the album features manipulated vocal samples, most of which appear to be taken from the same female singer. On "Dawn People Rising," her voice is edited so that it loosely seems to say the group's name. The album has a few moments when it seems to be stretching too far in order to make the sounds work together, particularly the frantic, cluttered drums tripping over themselves at the beginning of "Wishing Ring." For the most part, though,
The Star Is Your Future is a fun, adventurous trip, and is highly recommended to anyone who believes that BS 2000's vinyl-only debut is one of the crown jewels of the Grand Royal catalog. ~ Paul Simpson