Diego Chavez, a.k.a. Aether, is heretofore best known for remixing Swedish pop singer Lykke Li's song “Little Bit.” Those who come to his debut full-length Artifacts with only that information may be somewhat surprised, though, because this — a nostalgic, largely instrumental hip-hop album — bears little resemblance to dance or pop music.
When reviewing instrumental hip-hop records, I find it best just to start with the elephant in the room: Artifacts is almost nothing like Endtroducing...... Where Endtroducing.....'s instrumental samples were clear, articulate, and obsessively sequenced as to occasionally evoke classical orchestration, the entirety of Artifacts seems more distant, more obscured. The vocals, which are quite distorted to begin with, often become less distinct as songs progress, swirling around the beats until they become so unintelligible as to take on purely sonic meaning.
Besides that one trick, there's not a great deal of ground that hasn't been covered before. The whole album is filled with the same boom-bap beats that we already know and love, and many songs fall into a repetitive groove for minutes on end. It's obvious that Chavez has a great deal of love and respect for the great instrumental hip-hop DJs, but love isn't enough to create a classic album.
The album drags most when Chavez seems like he's trying to sound like someone else. In the opening and coda of “Autumn Pisces,” a sampled voice repeats, “May there be peace and love,” and in “Eleven Eleven,” “Wars will not be fought.” Vocal samples were one of Endtroducing.....'s greatest strengths, lending the entire album a sense of deeper, stranger, even sinister meaning. Like nearly every one of Shadow's disciples, what Aether fails to realize is that it was the obscurantism of their usage that made them so powerful; there's no mystery to samples exhorting you to practice peace and love, no matter how chopped-up or buried in the mix they are.
Still, the best tracks, particularly the elegiac standout “To Her,” help to make up for some of Chavez's missteps. And, at its best, Artifacts is profoundly autumnal, almost nocturnal — a headphones album if there ever was one.
1. Forgive Me
2. Dejame Dormir
3. To Her
4. Milla Ann
5. Anywhere
6. It Was
7. Autumn Pisces
8. Orfeu Negro
9. Reflection
10. Variance
11. Rain Or Shine
12. Caparra
13. Dame Un
14. Beso
15. Makeshift Sanctuary
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