Rapping With Paul White

Rapping with Paul White combines a series of moods and ideas and ties them together with quirky skits and a varied palate of samples, all with the charm we've grown to expect from White.

Do not sleep. The lush soundscapes of the vivid and fascinating world of Paul White await.

He's a white man crafting beats behind street-level odes to marking out territory from the likes of Detroit's Guilty Simpson and Marv Won, plus others, and he draws on a cornucopia of cultures to do so. Latin, Middle Eastern, African and, worst of all for Starkey, freaky German (NOT THEM!) Moog music rears up on a seductive record that reveals itself in layers.

Some will call it noise, others a beautifully complicated symphony. In the end, you're not quite sure where you've landed, but you're glad you took the trip.

Rapping With Paul White is part Afrobeat and/or ambient instrumental hip-hop, part energetic and demented rap, and part scavenger hunt of all the painfully obscure samples that sprinkle through White's beats.

Considering how he and White have a past history of collaborating, you'd think that Guilty Simpson and White would be firing on all cylinders by now; instead, the Detroit hardhead unfurls cliché after cliché and drops vague, autobiographical teases that don't reveal much in particular.

A trip for questing bohemians of every persuasion. [Dec. 2011 p.96]

It;s the mesmerising sonic weave which provides the intrigue. [Oct 2011, p.117]

Rapping With Paul White continues to put the world on notice that White is on equal footing with many of the underground's most esteemed vinyl spinners. It just doesn't provide much evidence that White is as accomplished at working out what an album of his should sound like other than more of the sample-exploration we've already come to expect of him.