CityBeat: Album Review: Gonjasufi – MU.ZZ.LE

January 27, 2012 by Quan Vu Leave a Comment

Seth Combs went in on Gonjasufi’s MU.ZZ.LE album, which just dropped this week. You can read the review in this week’s CityBeat. I’m not sure about him conflating “comforting familiarity” with catchiness though. I mean, if Gonjasufi had indulged his weirdness more to pander to critics who loved A Sufi and a Killer, that would’ve been another sort of comforting familiarity, right? I wonder if the muzzle represents people that want to put him into an “artsy-fartsy weirdo” box.

Anyway, just some thoughts. Snippet below. Click here for the full review. Not sure if I’ll review it myself yet but I do have plans for something way more baller, eventually.

Now, we have a follow-up in MU.ZZ.LE, a 10-track mini-album that was produced by Sufi and local producer Psychopop. The distorted, trademark voice is still here, but the sonic experimentalism is dialed down a bit. He sounds like Mos Def at his most loose—indeed, “Venom” and “Blaksuit” sound like outtakes from the emcee’s 2004 release, The New Danger.

I can see fans of Sufi, who now lives in Las Vegas, embracing just about anything he puts out (the weed helps), but I can’t help but feel that Sufi has lost a bit of his edge. Songs like “The Blame” and “Nikels and Dimes” are downright catchy! I know, it’s weird that I’m bitching about a song being catchy, but you know what? Give me adventurousness and inaccessibility over retreads and comforting familiarity any day. I may not like it immediately, but I’ll at least commend the novelty.

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Access Sez So: Interview: Sergio Hernandez

April 24, 2011 by SDRaps.com Guest Leave a Comment

Later than expected but well worth the wait, here is another installment of Access Sez So. In an ideal world, Wes would’ve gotten a journalism degree and would be covering local hip-hop for CityBeat, The Reader, etc.

Originally I had set out to do a mini review of the Strange Habits EP by Sergio Hernandez, which dropped late in November last year. EP’s are short in nature, so I found myself struggling to review the release and thought that it’d be a lot more interesting if I got to know Sergio a little better through an interview. The result was my unprepared disorganized self asking a lot of questions out of sequence that turned into much longer conversations about music, art, beer and me trying to relate his upbringing in San Diego to my experiences with hip hop growing up as a teen in small towns on the East Coast. As I realized interviews were a lot harder than planned, he agreed to come back to the shop to finish up the interview and the next day he presented me with a bottle of beer that exceeded 10% abv, I assume so I could relax a little and get focused, and so I basically reworked my entire interview based on the previous day’s conversations. This turned out to be a much better call then shorting SDRaps.com readers with a quick review, where you would have missed the parts about this OG San Diego graf head and an extremely talented individual.

Sergio Hernandez “Roaches” [prod. MRR]
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