by Daniel Olney

At the end of 2020 Rhys Langston’s artistic life began to change. He was running an old version of Logic on his MacBook purchased in 2012. That MacBook became unusable at the end of 2020. Naked without the ability to organize music in the traditional way, one of the most cerebral artists in the underground picked up instruments and crafted the kind of grooves that resonate and burrow in. Inverting existing basslines on a bass guitar, stacking foundational sonics and building Pale Black Negative from them. 

These grooves crafted from live instrumentation sparked unmistakable moods and this shifted the writing process for Rhys, totally unintentionally, it just made the most sense to find the right words and themes for the feeling these grooves elicited. In creating Pale Black Negative the writing wasn’t focused on pushing back against other trends in music or making a salient intellectual statement. Every line was a brush stroke finding the picture that these grooves were leading the ear to. When we talked about this on episode 256 State of The Game we discussed track 8 It Jes Grew (Right Outta Me) and how that song does what no rap song in 2025 can…it vamps. Over six minutes long the music moves you and at a certain point Rhys is just talking along with it about his hair. This is how classic funk songs used to feel. Rap is too lyrically pressurized in the underground space for anyone to simply vamp. It’s an unmistakable indicator of how free Pale Black Negative is. 

Rhys Langston maintains a mastery of unique words and colorful usage of them. It’s just that the framework his intelligent design fits into is looser, warmer, and the most fun to digest it’s ever been. Some songs need to be crooned, some are poems, others are an unmistakably impressive flow and most are a mix. How many people would even think of Ate the Tuning Fork While I Taxied In The Crepuscular? How many people could mix spoken word, rap and the squeal of horns like we get on the title track? Pale Black Negative was written, performed, composed and produced by one person who took giant steps in each realm. 

I knew this was my favorite album when I was with my family on a boat ride. I hate boats but they love it so I went. They went to an island to explore. I don’t like that island; it’s just a bunch of rocks and pooping birds. I stayed on the boat, laid on my back, closed my eyes and listened to Pale Black Negative all the way through. Listened to the calm drone of Andrew Mbaruk on Psychic Rhyming Like Kings, the bassline sliding into the horns on To Write Out Is, coming back to the soft pluck of Legal Tender (Sanction What Is Soft). Eyes walking the sky I let the music fill my environment as I was at anchor and all I could think about was how everything will be different now. Rhys can’t go back to making music the way things were, as a fan of the music I can’t go back after having fuzzy earwig songs like Early Hominid in the Crag Of Heartbreak. These eleven songs are one journey, each of them complete and unchangeable even in the frantic looseness of construction. We all just experienced the smartest person we know making it all fit with simple sounds that felt revealed not created, adventurous hooks and images, adding up to an experience more human than a linear process would have gotten us.

Now that we have breathed in this magic we have to chase it back to where it lives…right?