Maboroshi - MAWASHIGERI featuring MURO DABO

April 6th, 2005 by EJ

My friend George is currently living in Tokyo, and I’m totally jealous. I can’t be there to hang out with him, so he’s promised to keep sending me cool things to listen to from Japanese artists. Recently, as the result of a freak incident, he ended up with a CD player that almost got trampled by traffic from people exiting the bullet train. Rather than allow the CD player to travel the countryside by bullet train, he rescued it from the roaring crowd and was unable to find the owner. OOPS. Well, someone’s loss is our gain, because inside was this CD. The band is called Maboroshi, the CD is entitled Warudakumi (which means “sinister design” in Japanese apparently) and I couldn’t find out too much about them because their website is all in Japanese! I did learn, from reading around, that Maboroshi consists of Mummy-D (Rhymster) and Tomoyasu Takeuchi (Super Butter Dog). Everything else I got was from the music, and…regarding that…well, it’s some of the best, most diverse, most smoothed out, smoking hip hop I’ve heard in a while and I couldn’t wait to share it with you. The flows and the style are reminiscent of the Sugar Hill Gang, Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five, and even the Beastie Boys circa Paul’s Boutique-era, so if you like that, you’ll flip out when you hear this. There are a lot of tributary Stanley Jordan, Al Green/Willie Mitchell, Funkadelic, and Jimi Hendrix-style riffs laced throughout the CD, and it sways madly through Blues, Rock, Soul, Jazz, and Funk styles constantly. Here’s what George had to say in our AIM conversation:

BDW OX (7:44:11 PM): ok first the mc talking about how he is pretty fucking amazing and back on the fat mic and how this bout is about to begin, then about how he will rock the discoteque attack, and mack, attack and hack
BDW OX (7:45:03 PM): brutal flow dope with the afro
BDW OX (7:49:39 PM): the 3rd mc on the track is the B to the I to the G Daddy Sama
BDW OX (7:50:36 PM): and i think the chourus is “its the bus, don’t take the bus”
BDW OX (7:52:26 PM): and the part at the end that is being scrached is saying “i jam loudly”

Well, there you have it, straight from George’s fingers. I don’t think I could sum it up any better. Just download and listen. This CD is total madness — the kind I could get used to hearing a lot more of.

BONUS TRACK:
Maboroshi - BREMEN featuring CHANNEL, K.I.N., CUEZERO