The astral hip-hop phenomenon Shabazz Palaces, one of the concert highlights of 2017, is returning to the Šiška palace, not just with his latest album The Don of Diamond Dreams (2020), but with rarities and unreleased material off of an upcoming collection.
The event is cancelled. Already purchased tickets can be returned until April 22, 2023 through Eventim.
At their first gig in Šiška in 2015, Shabazz Palaces, then still a duo, played more than two hours for an exhilarated audience, until they ran out of songs to play. Returning in 2017, they cooked up the concert of the year according to Radio Študent. We don’t know what awaits us this time, but based on past experience, here’s a guess: beats beamed from Afrofuturistic galaxies, hypnotic word clouds – and a gig that is not to be missed. The driving force behind the project Ishmael Butler, also a member of the legendary jazz rappers Digable Planets, parted ways with long-time collaborator Tendai Maraire in 2020. Together, they had become the first hip-hop act to be signed to the famed Sub Pop label, released masterpiece albums such as Black Up and Lese Majesty, collaborated with acts such as Flying Lotus, Animal Collective and Thundercat, and introduced us to their own vision of hip-hop, distant from dominant rap trends and anchored somewhere between abstraction, avantgarde and the cosmos.
However, their collaboration came to an end on the fifth Shabazz Palaces album The Don of Diamond Dreams. Butler found inspiration for new sonic adventures in his own son Lil Tracy. The apple truly didn’t fall far from the tree, as Lil Tracy is also a founding member of a collective that took hip-hop in a new direction – emo rap pioneers GothBoiClique, who also counted the deceased Lil Peep among their members. Butler thus drew directly from the sounds of today’s youth, filtering them through his own veteran wisdom, and served up yet another excellent, bold album, suffused in that which defines almost all great art: the willingness to risk attempting something new.
We’ll witness Butler’s artistic renewal and his diamond dreams on April 20, and we’re also looking forward to material off of The Lost Vibes Of Shabazz: The Skrilla Scrolls, an upcoming collection of rarities and unreleased songs. You can watch the video for the first single, filmed in Baška, Croatia, below.
Tickets on sale online and at Eventim outlets.
BON21
Tickets can also be purchased with the BON21 voucher at the Kino Šiška box office from Monday to Friday between 3 and 8 PM or on the day of the event. You can read more about the requirements for using the voucher on the Financial Administration of the Republic of Slovenia website.
Organisation: Kino Šiška.
