Be sure to munch that eighth of mushrooms in your sock drawer before heading to the Brattle Tuesday for the A/V ride of a lifetime. Or if you ransacked your psilocybin stash on Halloween, a bottle of Robitussin could guide you through the screening of Edan's kaleidoscopic Echo Party movie and encore live performance.
Edan is one of the few hip-hop artists who sparks amazement in cats ranging from rap legends to indie rockers, his multi-dextrous rapping-DJ blitz a favorite from the South Bronx to festivals like All Tomorrow's Parties. A famously seclusive perfectionist who takes years to record his projects, the Berklee veteran and one-time Boston resident is best defined by his eclectic curiosities.
In designing the 30-minute Echo Party record (which dropped last November), Edan employed the catalogues of Chocolate Star and other extinct throwback imprints. From there, he composed an aural gauntlet packed with trippy blips, reverb, and nostalgia. So when it came time to cut a movie for the mix, director Tom Fitzgerald was a natural fit — he's tweaked visuals for Cali DJ icon Cut Chemist's comparable confusion.
A visionary with arsenals of arcane footage, for the Echo Party DVD Fitzgerald used a variety of vaulted clips featuring, among other things, vintage drum sessions, booty action, ethnic obscurities, and graffiti sprees. On the edit side, he meticulously matched speed, texture, and even color to Edan's countless synth elbows, snare punches, and various other sound assaults.
"[This movie] uses found footage in the same way 'golden era' hip-hop producers and DJs sampled [records] to make music," says Fitzgerald. "[In those] days you had to come out with beats [and] samples that nobody had heard or you sounded corny . . . [My] goal was to use found footage that nobody's seen — no Muppets or Star Wars." Adds Edan: "The beauty of the Echo Party thing is that Tom and I have a very similar feel and aesthetic. It's almost tough to tell which came first . . . the audio or the video."
