The afterlife still holds humanity’s last great secrets, facilitating, if we believe in the enormous void, the passage of those who go there. The most complicated task falls to those who remain here, charged with bearing the weight of absence and preserving the legacy. When Stepa J. Groggs passed away in 2020, RiTchie and Parker Corey became the guarantors of the continuity of the work that the three of them began with Injury Reserve, a group from Phoenix, Arizona, who escaped any and all attempts at musical confinement between Live From The Dentist Office (2015) and By The Time I Get To Phoenix (2021).
From explorers of the limits of rap music (associated with the “jazz rap” of A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, and the rest of the Native Tongues), they became true sound investigators in their own right (using raw material from Black Country, New Road, black midi, The Fall, Brian Eno, and King Crimson to lose themselves between the lines). On IR’s final album, the first and last after Groggs’ death, the experimental, surreal, dense, and abstract continuum (where both Shabazz Palaces and Death Grips fit in the showcase) was honored in a sonic storm made of shards, layers, and intense performances by all involved, fading in “Bye Storm,” the track that closes the lineup and connects directly to “Double Trio,” the inaugural single from the duo that remained. In this new lineup, RiTchie came out from behind the smoke screen and reclaimed his place as a rapper with pride (even if the conventional is not something that interests him in the least).
Since 2023, By Storm has searched (amongst mismatched debris) for the moon that bathed King Krule in “Zig Zag,” found light in a jazzy cacophony reminiscent of Flying Lotus’s freer and more electronic explorations in “Double Trio 2,” landed in the spiritual realm of billy woods & Kenny Segal’s “Soft Landing” with “In My Town,” and, as mentioned in the Genius comment box, explored in “And I Dance” what could well be an alternate universe where Jay-Z and Kanye West (from the Watch The Throne and Yeezus era) still made music together.
Adventurous since their first appearance, their ability to express emotion in such a raw and honest way remains one of their greatest weapons. With the deadAir Records label (home to Jane Remover and dazegxd), My Ghosts Go Ghost, the title of their debut album as a duo, features only one guest artist (woods) and marks the beginning of yet another journey on this side of one of the duos that has best known how to add credibility to the vast lexicon of non-commercial, avant-garde (spazz) rap.
AR
