Photography & Review by Thom Hooper
Twenty-six years after Deltron 3030 collectively imagined a futuristic world gone sideways, Del the Funky Homosapien, Dan the Automator and Kid Koala brought their epic sci-fi hip-hop masterpiece to a sold-out crowd at The Orange Peel in Asheville, North Carolina on Tuesday night.
The group’s self-titled debut arrived back in 2000 wrapped in science fiction concept record; a future of corporate domination, technological overload, social decay and artists attempting to maintain some trace of individuality inside the machinery.
Kyle Rapps kicked off the Asheville show for Deltron 3030, pulling in the crowd’s attention quickly with his confident and memorable performance. He had a sound that personally reminded me of something in-between Homeboy Sandman and early Talib Kweli, which is to say, other artists that I appreciate and enjoy.
There was no sense of downtime throughout the night, by the end of Kyle Rapps set, Kid Koala was taking over, moving the night forward without allowing that momentum built to taper off.
Calling what followed by Kid Koala simply a “DJ set” doesn’t do it proper justice, in my opinion, because he’s never treated turntables as background equipment. His contribution to Deltron 3030 has always been as part of the group’s architecture rather than decoration and his opening set highlighted why extremely well.
Kid Koala functioned both as a fantastic performance that captivated the crowd and transition, taking the energy that Kyle Rapps established; reshaping it for the full reveal of Deltron 3030.
This momentum allowed the night to never feel as though it had a dull moment.
By the time Del the Funky Homosapien and Dan the Automator joined Kid Koala on the stage, the sold-out Orange Peel was ready. The songs all sounded huge live, really bringing attention to every fantastic soundscape their music creates. For anyone unfamiliar with exactly who exactly Deltron 3030 is, the résumé is honestly ridiculous.
Dan the Automator has spent decades leaving fingerprints across some of the most imaginative records to come out of hip-hop’s stranger corners such as Dr. Octagon.
You may be familiar with Dan’s other productions, beyond Deltron 3030, as he’s produced albums with Handsome Boy Modeling School, Gorillaz, Black Keys, and Dredg, to name only a few.
The common thread isn’t really a specific genre, so much as an unwillingness to make records that sound like everybody else. He builds entire landscapes in his productions and doesn’t merely give an MC somewhere to rap, he provides the atmosphere, geography and what feels like the rules of the place where the song is taking you.
Kid Koala occupies an equally important position in Deltron’s machinery. His scratches, samples and turntable work provide movement and texture, sometimes slip into spaces you barely notice and sometimes cutting straight across the music. If you remove him, you don’t simply lose a few scratches but in many ways alter the character of the record. His solo records over the years have been a testament to his individual creativity and he’s also collaborated with Dan the Automator (under the pseudonym “Nathaniel Merriweather”) beyond Deltron 3030, with the group Lovage.
And last but not least, there is Del the Funky Homosapien. Hieroglyphics. His solo records, guest appearances and collaborations; absolutely masterful. Decades of verses with complicated ideas and technical rhyme patterns that somehow retain a loose feeling of someone who just conceived the line five seconds before saying it.
Del has been lyrically killing it for a very long time, and hearing him in Asheville was another reminder that technical ability means far more when it doesn’t sound like someone actually trying to demonstrate technical ability; the combination that really makes Deltron 3030 work.
It would have been easy for Deltron 3030′s debut album to have been forgotten; it was a concept record featuring futuristic characters, intergalactic rap battles in the 31st century with technology, corporations and revolutions. In lesser hands, it could have become an hour of someone explaining their screenplay over beats. Instead, the concept gave Del, Dan and Kid Koala room to exaggerate the present until its problems became easier to perceive.
The material from the original 2000 release has aged, certainly, but not in the way you might expect. It doesn’t merely produce recognition because people remember where they were when they first heard it; in many examples, people are still discovering the original album and group to this day.
Its central ideas and them have acquired additional weight with technology occupying and invading seemingly every part of daily life. Corporate power increasingly concentrated, culture increasingly processed through enormous platforms and the struggle between creativity and systems designed to package, reproduce and monetize it.
The remarkable aspect of the lyrical content is that it never turns the performance into a lecture, even years later. Deltron 3030 remains a hip-hop record first, and live it becomes bigger and more physical than the record suggests. Dan‘s production already had a cinematic scale but pushed through a venue sound system, it truly sounds on another level. What can sound intricately constructed in headphones becomes something much grander in scale when performed live. Kid Koala fills the cracks, Del rides over the whole thing, and the three remain distinct enough that you can hear precisely what each person contributes.
Plenty of tours built around records from 20 or 25 years ago operate primarily as preservation exercises and there’s nothing wrong with that. Great records deserve to be celebrated, and audiences love to hear music that mattered, and still matters, to them.
This record has seemingly caught another wind because the world has moved closer to it. That is an achievement for an album released in 2000, particularly one whose premise could once have been dismissed as elaborate underground-rap futurism where jokes still work, the imagination still works and the production still sounds incredibly ambitious and masterfully delivered. Perhaps most importantly, the ideas underneath all of it still have something to worth actually saying and talking about.
Collectively, Deltron 3030 sounded absolutely fantastic together live in a rare anniversary-era performance that doesn’t leave you thinking primarily about the past.
If your knowledge of Del the Funky Homosapien is limited to Gorillaz‘s “Clint Eastwood,” who they are currently on tour with, you should know there is an enormous of great music waiting for you behind that door. You can start with Deltron 3030; put the whole record on and don’t shuffle it, don’t skim through it looking for the radio recognizable song, sincerely let the album unfold the way it was built. It remains one of the better concept albums that I’ve ever heard.
If Deltron 3030 are playing live anywhere close to you, please consider going to see what these songs sound like and become in a large room full of people. It’s really worth the experience.
