About

A TAV Curator’s Pick.

Lese Majesty is the second studio album by American hip hop duo Shabazz Palaces, originally released in 2014 by Sub Pop. Shabazz Palaces the experimental hip-hop duo led by Ishmael Butler, aka Palaceer Lazaro (formerly Butterfly of jazz–hip hop group Digable Planets) and multi-instrumentalist Tendai "Baba" Maraire, son of Mbira master Dumisani Maraire.

“Herein bumps and soars Lese Majesty, the new sonic action of Shabazz Palaces. Honed and primal, chromed and primo. A unique and glorified offering into our ever-uniforming musical soundscape. Lese Majesty is a beatific war cry, born of a spell, acknowledging that sophistication and the instinctual are not at odds; Indeed an undoing of the lie of their disparate natures.

Lese Majesty is not a launching pad for the group’s fan base increasing propaganda.  It is a series of astral suites, recorded happenings, shared. A dare to dive deep into Shabazz Palaces sounds, vibrations unfettered. A dope-hex thrown from the compartments that have artificially contained us all and hindered our sublime collusion.

These reveries were sent to Palaceer Lazaro and Fly Guy ‘Dai in the year of gun beat battles in excess; In a succession of days, whilst walking in dreams and in varied transcendental states….(every minute of every day is filled with observation and composition. In action). Songs are committed and gathered by robots at Protect and Exalt Labs, a Black Space in Seattle, Washington.

The visual features of Lese Majesty are resultant of the gleanings of fellow Constellationaire, Nep Sidhu.

The Black Constellation squads up, protects and exalts the messages within, and colludes accordingly. We thank you.” – Sub Pop

“Spectacular, way-out hip-hop. Ishmael Butler and Tendai Maraire's music seems totally without precedent, and even if sometimes it's just too weird to enjoy, more often it's genuinely thrilling. …

Lese Majesty, his second album as one half of Shabazz Palaces, has found itself lauded in some quarters as "the future of hip-hop" – not a phrase that anyone was in a rush to append to Snoop Dogg's pop-reggae inspired Reincarnated, or indeed the goings-on at Cypress Hill's Smokeout festival and Medical Marijuana Expo.

Lese Majesty's predecessor, 2011's Black Up, was an album noted for its denseness and complexity. Reviewers struggled to find anything else even on rap's outer fringes to liken it to. If you wanted a comparison from the rock world, you might suggest that Butler and Tendai "Baba" Maraire's work has a similar relationship to hip-hop as Captain Beefheart's late-60s ouevre did to the blues: it takes a heavily codified genre and warps it so dramatically that the result bears almost no resemblance to its musical roots. To extend the Beefheart metaphor further, you could claim that Lese Majesty is to Black Up what 1969's Trout Mask Replica was to its predecessors, the point where the music snips any last slender ties to commerciality and ventures out into the unknown. Breakbeats are chopped up until they frequently lurch from one deeply unfunky time signature to another. Virtually none of the tracks have anything you would describe as a standard structure.” – The Guardian

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