Candlelight: 90s Hip Hop on Strings

Candlelight: 90s Hip Hop on Strings takes the golden-era rap catalogue and rebuilds it for string quartet, played in a room lit by candles. Music made from sampled loops, drum machines and a rapped vocal line is handed to four acoustic instruments that have none of those things.

The translation is less strange than it sounds. Much of the era's production was itself assembled from strings, horns and soul records chopped into two-bar loops, so putting real strings back on the material returns it to a source it never entirely left. What a quartet cannot supply is the voice, and the arrangements deal with that by letting the vocal hook migrate into a violin line while the cello takes on the work the bass and kick drum used to share.

Heard unamplified by candlelight, the music loses its low end and gains its counterpoint. Hooks that function as chants on record have to survive as melodies. The result is neither parody nor mimicry but a straight reading of songs whose harmonic writing has usually been treated as incidental.