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“On Dela's second album Changes of Atmosphere, there is a trace of unadorned irony and coincidence that does a lot to explain the nuance of Dela's sound.

On the song "The Plan," guest rappers Dynas and Lycian rap about America's cavalier foreign policy as a way to contrast the domestic failure surrounding Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans. It's certainly not an original poetic construct but to hear the following lines, "Eight days in the Superdome / Most was losin' their homes / For your deeds, New Orleans / Is knee deep in corpses / Five days behind you wouldn't leave your fortress," rapped over faux-jazz and faux-hip hop has its own strange logic to diplomacy versus domesticity.

Dela, a white French producer writes jazz-infused hip hop, which means taking two musical traditions borne from African-American culture and creating his own armchair interpretation. Dynas and Lucian, two black American rappers, criticize white America's mishandling of non-white peoples both abroad and in New Orleans, a predominantly black area of the country that was originally a French colony. Furthermore, the existence of blacks in the United States in the first place is a product of slavery, which itself is a product of European colonization. Despite all of these twisting strands of causality and musical reappropriation that point to Dela's music being blaxsploitation, there is a tremendous harmony because Dela's jazzy hip hop and his guest rappers' protest lyrics. Simply put, it works.

 It's as if Dela's music is its own special form of diplomacy that dispels the lamentable history of white expansion and black subjugation by embracing the silver lining: black culture's positive contributions to American, and at this point, global culture, namely musical the musical developments, hip hop and jazz. Dela's music is an homage, a peace pipe, and a humble offering. Changes of Atmosphere is his hopeful contribution.” – Sputnik Music

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