Little Johnny from the Hospitul: Breaks & Instrumentals Vol.1

Untitled

Little Johnny from the Hospitul is Company Flow's second album and was released in 1999.

The term "instrumental hip-hop" does not do this album anything resembling justice. Perhaps Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker can collaborate on a split EP to invent a new word worthy to describe Johnny's "genre," preferably a word that makes you queasy about the coming technological apocalypto-revolution at its mere utterance.

"Comp" primes the listener for dark brutality when DJ Mr. Len scratches "Profession is rippin' tracks. So if you're ready, have plenty of back...cuz I attack" while chopped voices are strangled through the room. The next three songs turn your quarters into a third-eye movie about walking down a prison hallway in strobe-light slow motion at midnight through Venetian-blind shadows, wearing plastic 3-D glasses and a Rammellzee mask. Oh yeah - while being molested. "Suzy Pulled a Pistol on Henry"'s drum beat trips in the middle like a funky robot and ends with a quicksilver-drizzling cymbal, looped for your pleasure like a cocaine rat at the feeder bar over and over for 6 minutes. "Friend vs. Friend" puts a microphone in skin to record fear seeping through pores, then lopes through molasses riding on a clydesdale made of trumpets after your neighborhood tollbooth worker chants, "I'm gonna KILL someone." To make sure you don't get up from your slouch couch for the next 60 minutes, "Linoleum" dissects your cerebellar x-y-z matrix with backtracking drum freaks, doubling back on themselves while someone presses down rhythmically on a xylophone made of liquid titanium frogs. "Workers Needed" takes the "Holy Mountain" clips from "Funcrusher Plus" and isolates the infinite galactic assembly-line slavery vibe in boiled-down format with truly minimalist bamboo-torture click-beats. "Gigapet Epiphany" opens a man-hole in the roof of the universe and shines a beam of shimmering tv-static on your face while drums huddle, train, march to combat and triumph. It doesn't hurt that the benevolent voice of God in all its splendor makes a scratched cameo, and for the last time, the word of God is "So." "BMS Digital" takes the listener immediately back down to bowels, skipping along the surface of sewer slime on the wake of a Rammellzee wave-runner. In case the drums of Gigapet missed any heathens, the martial heartbeats return on "Worker Ant Uprise" to convert every remaining savage in the galaxy to the church of hip-hop celebrated at the mighty St. El-P Cathedral. "World of Garbage" tricks you into thinking the struggle is futile, that man's fulfilled search for meaning always lands him in an insane asylum or under a bridge, but you're wrong. You're saved. The universe as you know it negatives itself like a gastropod on "Happy Happy Joy Kill," reavealing a variegated Moebius-strip bass string of rainbow coils. It's okay. Follow this path, and yes, you will go insane, but only the truly immortal ever do.

Track listing

1. "Comp"
2. "Suzy Pulled a Pistol on Henry"
3. "Friend vs. Friend"
4. "Linoleum"
5. "Bee Aware"
6. "Workers Needed"
7. "Number Nine"
8. "Gigapet Epiphany"
9. "BMS Digital"
10. "No Lock"
11. "Shadows Drown"
12. "Worker Ant Uprise"
13. "Indelible Hybrid"
14. "World of Garbage"
15. "Blackout"
16. "Happy Happy Joy Kill"