The opening moments of BLNC-SC23 plunge you right into the gritty, brutalist hip-hop underground that producer Blanceus and rapper Sc23 have constructed (and dismantled) on their ambitious collaborative project. As much an experiment in making as it is in disrupting the hip-hop archive, BLNC-SC23 is a bold sonic departure toward a murkier unknown.
“I was interested in the idea of artefacts from history, things found buried in a ruin or from another universe,” Blanceus says. “What would this album sound like if it was recovered from beneath the rubble?” This thought serves as the catalyst for BLNC-SC23’s deconstructed, industrial sound. Tracks like “SELL-A-TAPE” and “The Key!” come shrouded in sheets of distortion, and within this liminality Blanceus clashes classic with contemporary.
That’s not to say the project is entirely novel in its approach. Much of it sounds indebted to something that came before. Keen ears will pick up a bevy of references that haunt these grounds, from Moormother to early Kanye West. But that’s sort of the point. “I began to see the album as a lost file, an homage to the history of rap production that I grew up with and have been informed by,” Blanceus says. From Sc23’s perspective, this carried a particular creative weight. “This project is something my soul needed. Justin’s production pushed me in a direction no other producer could.”
You can hear it in his performance. Sc23 sounds assured, enlightened, and totally awestruck across the album, making choices that break with convention. Take “The Key!”. Built around a looped gospel refrain, a familiar melodic cadence that becomes the glowing heart of a dubby, speed garage pastiche, Sc23 breaks the fourth wall.
“I can’t even rap on this part, this is the part of the track that feels like I made it,” the rapper says mid-song as the beat switches suddenly to soaring, retro synthwave. It’s an audacious shake-up that feels pulled from the Oneohtrix Point Never playbook, revealing what makes BLNC-SC23 so engaging: it’s totally unafraid to push the boat way out, making it feel like the album unfolds in real time.
These tracks feel like conversations between two artists in the languages of their respective mediums. Blanceus’ beats respond to, and sometimes contradict, Sc23’s flow. On “RunninHide”, Balnceus’ blues vocal sample is given little space as a refrain, instead in active call-and-response to Sc23’s verses. They sometimes overlap, sometimes harmonise. The result is a marriage between performer and beat that feels remarkably organic. “It felt like every beat was tailored for an emotion I had not yet explored,” Sc23 says. “Our chemistry is unique and unspoken.”
This feeling of conversation is something Blanceus looked to achieve through experimental production tactics that reframed traditional production as an act of excavation. “Often Norman would come with a freestyle or verse written over a YouTube beat,” he says. “Then I would delete the beat. What remained was a blank canvas of vocals to build around. It became a kind of archaeology. I had the skeleton of a song and had to give it context and life.”
BLNC-SC23 is a bold reimagining of the South African hip-hop template, a document of the underground from which Blanceus and Sc23 emerge. It’s most successful as an archive of the collaboration between two fearless creative forces, a transcript of a process defined by instinct and mutual creative understanding that has resulted in one of local hip-hop’s most exciting projects to date.
All photographs by Mbulelo Hlela.
