Sixtoo

The present hour finds SIXTOO (Robert Squire) at the most exciting juncture of his musical career, which, while already boasting a storied history, shows signs of being only in the nascent stages of its fullest potential. Newly backed with the familial support of Ninja Tune Records – the fabled Montreal-based collective (Kid Koala, Amon Tobin, etc.) amongst whom the Haligonian has found a new home – Sixtoo is finally afforded the representation and the scope potential he has laboured for since his first cassettes were released in the early 1990s. Now, after recently producing two very strong efforts – Antagonist Survival Kit (Vertical Form, 2003) and Duration (Cease & Desist, 2002) – that were fatally limited by feeble publicity and distribution, Sixtoo has conjured up his most adventurous work to date for the precise label that can get it heard, and heard widely.

Chewing On Glass and Other Miracle Cures, Sixtoo’s inaugural full-length release for Ninja Tune (following the Boxcutter Emporium 12” of early 2004), represents an ambitious creative turn for an artist already threatening to become one of his school’s eminent producers. This recording fully embodies the artist’s patented downcast instrumental production – with a sound steeped in an underground authenticity – while adding to it an ideologically wayward but grounded tangent: Chewing On Glass singularly bridges the rift between the concrete soundscape of Sixtoo’s sample-based music and the experimental preference of his own ear’s mind (wherein avant-garde rock giants like Can, Joy Division, and Godspeed You Black Emperor! abound). This blending is as seamlessly executed – with Sixtoo at the helm of every aspect of the album’s composition, engineering, recording, and production – as it is unusual.

With his most recent output, Sixtoo has not abandoned the compositional blueprint that he expended (successfully) with his sample-based work in The Sebutones (beside fellow Nova Scotian Buck 65), and on Sage Francis’ wildly successful Personal Journals (Anticon). Instead, he has built from that model a pointedly live record: one on which original composition and performance are the things of greatest import, not the depth of his record collection or sample pool. And while the resultant work is stylistically reminiscent of that tested method of extrapolative composition, it bests it by striking a completely uncharted path: one of innovation, experimentation and instrumentality, upon which the minute density of minimalism and the maximalism of dirge rock intersect to forge a new understanding of hip hop: its rhythms, its techniques, and philosophies.