DEBRIEFING: ELUCID | 18 January 2025 | Brooklyn, NY | Baby’s All Right
A report from ELUCID’s REVELATOR tour
ELUCID began his set at Baby’s All Right with his back to the crowd. His broad frame was silhouetted by the wall of a thousand bulbs as excerpts from his INTERFERENCE PATTERN project played through the system [AH’s “Doves” in the ducts]. His set followed an unconventional diptych structure: the first half, a quadruple of I Told Bessie tracks and a selection of scattered offerings; for the second half, it was REVELATOR time. The death of David Lynch just three days prior [whose sampled voice, you’ll recall, waxes lyrical about daydreams on AH’s “Falling Out the Sky”] had me internet-hunting his paintings, a part of his artistic output I’ve largely ignored. I fell upon Diptych: Dark Shape Behind a Veil (1987), a piece that seems to fold vertically and horizontally with a shadowy, befogged figure floating along a fissure—chalk-white, black, and grayscale smudgery. ELUCID’s been splitting veils, too [go back to “Ghoulie,” if verification is what you seek], and so I received his performance through this fractured lens.
At multiple points, ELUCID would lean-speak into the mic and say, “It’s an experience”—on a Hendrix trip. And despite us calling him a seer | a mystic | a revelator, here he was as a haruspex, studying our entrails1—audience vile viscera and numbles, a real Gutfest ’25. Don’t act shocked, G. I knew he was studying the de Kooning of our bowel-jam because he went wide-eyed when he was spitting, which isn’t his default mode. I’ve seen ELUCID look heavenward, seen him look grimace-faced and squinting outward, seen him rock and sway holding the mic with two hands like a baby’s bottle, but I’ve yet to see him possession-stare at us with Graves’ disease bulging eyeballs. Agog at all of us: a collection of misplaced graves of his making. I saw him do it several times. And billy woods, in his set of (mostly) album openers that preceded ELUCID’s headlining set, growled for several from-his-chest renditions of songs [“You know they hit that pipe again” on “A Day in a Week in a Year”; “Sometimes you pay later in ways you never even dreamed” on “383 Myrtle”; and the final remorseless on “Remorseless”]. Yeah, so what I’m thinking is, some trance state was ritualized into existence on Saturday night. I mark the start of the ceremony with Creature’s “CCTV” acapella near the end of Rebelmattic’s set, a momentary rap reprieve from a majorly riff-heavy routine in the hardcore range [they callus-ripped, for the record].
I’ll never tire of ELUCID dragging out the word spelling on “Spellling,” which was his somewhat surprising set opener (I imagined a quick launch into “THE WORLD IS DOG”). His pronunciation of the word seems to elongate with every subsequent live performance, to the point where the spell is now just in a perpetual state of being cast. It takes on new meaning, and renews meaning, and remakes meaning—the same goes for the Homeric epithet “the Revelator armed and dangerous” that he emphasizes on “Old Magic.” Armed and dangerous, but also armed with concrete—“I ain’t made of feathers,” E-40 once said.2 ELUCID smiles and snarls in equal measure.
ELUCID invited woods and Quelle Chris to join him for “Sardonyx,” but they never made it to the stage. It was for the better, because the track short-circuited after ELUCID’s verse, so he ended up holding the stage dolo, but this was no 14.4 modem—T1, at least. woods stepped up as the track devolved into a noisy racket, apologizing. ELUCID kept it dolo with WHT LBL’s “Resin” and Nostrum Grocers’ “Where’ing Those Flowers,” too. He pried off his black jacket and revealed a multi-pocketed fishing vest3 underneath, well-suited for a multifaceted voice—his arsenal’s full of hooks and tackle, so there’s really no need for him to tag out. ELUCID should be studied by younger performers of the underground renaissance, too many of which fall into the trap of what I call “rogue planet rapping” [or, “microgravity emceeing,” if you prefer] wherein they enact their terminally online generational isolation onstage, avoiding eye contact with the audience, floating hither and thither, spitting their single-verse songs without regard for the forging of connection—an insular recital.
Crooning the closing to “Betamax” (“still shiiiiining”) and riffing on his call to elevate “higher up” (higher up, higheruphigheruphigherup, hiiiiigher up) had me connecting ELUCID’s Bessie standout to Mos Def’s “Umi Says” for the first time ever—a chant, much like Mos’s, that wishes and lifts and fulfills hopes for Black people. For Black people to be free, to be free, to be free. I believe in Black people believing. Singing synchronistically across space-time, spliced together and tendered to those who need to hear it, who must hear it. I found “Hyssop” to be transformed as well. Its essential oil seizure woozy recording on Shit Don’t Rhyme No More felt more wartorn, but maybe that was only my associative thinking. As ELUCID growled the chorus lyric, “Godspeed you black emperor” (then emperahhh, then emperuh—an evolution | he morphs it | b e n d s it), my mind shifted to Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD. (“Statistics how he look at war casualties,” woods says on “Soft Landing.”) We gathered on Saturday with news of a ceasefire coming over the wire, sure, but you know as well as I do (or should) that words mean things but don’t have to. In geopolitics, there’s a flexible unreliability to death tolls, and even best estimates4 fall short. I’ve got the Cranberries’ “Zombie” lurking in my head, in my head—something about the same old theme since 1916—but it’s since 1948. With their tanks and their bombs, and their bombs and their guns…They are dying.
The first panel of the diptych, so to speak, concluded with Quelle Chris setting his camcorder down5 and appearing onstage. “I’m gonna calmly ask you guys to make some motherfucking noise,” he said, assuming his stool perch to sing of busy little bees and snap on ELUCID’s Wallabees. (“I’m from that era!” ELUCID defended.) It was a sobering moment within an otherwise intoxicating evening (two beer bottles slipped from drunken grips and shattered near the back of the venue where I was positioned; there were also reports of a fainting). But then another INTERFERENCE PATTERN excerpt played—a garbled and guttered voice, with gunshots or fireworks popping off (depending on how dreadful the conclusions are that you wish to draw). ELUCID cleverly reversed the order of the two excerpts, starting with the “Doves” piece while using the opening minutes as an intermission.
It made tech-sense for ELUCID to begin the REVELATOR half of his diptych with “YOTTABYTE,” as it predicted the lagging and defragging moments that occurred within the set—as if data storage was in short supply from his overflow of idears. “BAD POLLEN” took on new energy as ELUCID requested a volume increase across the [sound]board, an increase on everything. “I want those Dreamcrusher levels,” he said, shouting-out one of his Centenny Gz. woods made it out for this number, and between their verses, “SLUM OF A DISREGARD” started to channel in, an intercepted transmission, causing woods to start his verse several measures late. What resulted was some sonik-statik moments, but the duo still completed the track, hanging on by metal threads, lathe shavings. The nervy performance worked and brought revived life to a track that can feel inert on the album recording.
SKECH185 joined ELUCID for “14.4,” and they both preached about not trusting it if the poet doubt. SKECH was enticed into performing “Up to Speed” (ELUCID dropped the beat before SKECH even had a chance to skedaddle), which always | always | always wrecks. I’ve seen a demonstration of this McIntyre-Markey monster three or four times now, and it lacks the capacity to disappoint. SKECH’s voice cracked as he asked the audience if he went hard enough, and I’m always floored to realize there’s another verse to the song. SKECH185’s carotid artery rap—blood thickening in his neck and pulsating—restores feeling in my old legs. “These hands’ll smack the fuck out of one of my idols if they disrespect me and mine.” Who would dare?
Jon Nellen only became active on his drum kit with “THE WORLD IS DOG.” He cut an unassuming figure onstage, comfortably-casually dressed, yet provided an adrenal thrust upside ya head. The song culminated in an extempore call-and-response. “The world is…,” ELUCID led, and we all barked back, “DOG!” “CCTV” cued in hot with the initial metalcore measures of Fanon’s intensifier beat. But Creature had already done his verse earlier, so ELUCID opted to only perform the “all power to oppressed people” refrain over the chill-out coda of the beat.
“SLUM OF A DISREGARD,” foreshadowed earlier, catered to the crowd’s anticipation of a MY LANDLORD IS A ZIONIST cry from ELUCID, but it never came except for the chopped and loose-screwed backing track we know from the album mix. It was enough; it was an exercise in restraint. ELUCID’s mic cut in-and-out, not unlike that closing message. He was content chanting abuse of power comes as no surprise over and over. Nellen drummed frenetic and free in a Milford Gravesian manner. Like Baraka writing about Sonny Murray, Nellen acted “as a conductor of energies, directing them this way and that way.” ELUCID allowed him the moment, “the drums as a reactor and manifestor of energies coursing through and pouring out of his body.”
I was slightly dispirited at the absence of “VOICE 2 SKULL” and “XOLO,” as I see those songs plus “ZIGZAGZIG” as a shatterproof triad that closes REVELATOR. But as ELUCID announced “ZIGZAGZIG” as his last song, the decision seemed justified. “ZIGZAGZIG” ended before it began. Whether the audio malfunction was intended or just a grand mal seizure of the night, the crowd was left tonic-clonic’d as ELUCID spit a spattering of the song’s lyrics acapella: War clouds, cruel sky….6 We herded to the merch table in a postictal state, fantasizing about a limited CD-R in cardboard sleeve of the show just finished.
The performance, overall, was flawed—forgotten lyrics, beat miscues, missed cues, [inter]ruptures, absences, and jam-ups—but I welcomed it all. I arrived wanting a jamcon; I wanted live scum. I wanted messy mania befitting the atmosphere of REVELATOR, and that’s what we got. “I could’ve played for another hour,” Jon Nellen was overheard saying backstage. If only.
ELUCID setlist:
INTERFERENCE PATTERN [“Doves” excerpt]
“Spellling”
“Old Magic”
“Sardonyx”
“Roaches Don’t Fly”
“Resin”
“Where’ing Those Flowers”
“Betamax”
“Hyssop”
“How Could You Love Something Like Me?” [Quelle Chris solo]
INTERFERENCE PATTERN [excerpt]
“YOTTABYTE”
“BAD POLLEN” [with billy woods]
“14.4” [with SKECH185]
“Up to Speed” [SKECH185 solo]
“THE WORLD IS DOG”
“CCTV”
“SLUM OF A DISREGARD”
“IKEBANA”
“IN THE SHADOW OF IF”
“ZIGZAGZIG”
woods spit his “Bitter Cassava” verse during his set, and his bars about how “entrails spilt” but “there was never a vision” became undone by ELUCID’s performance. For woods, “there was never nothing in ’em,” those entrails, and the “sky was indifferent,” but ELUCID read ’em like an old, tattered issue of Rap Pages folded within an issue of Chimes Monthly and collapsed the earth and sky together. “When you punch a pin into a bug, there’s incredible textures just to a little bug—incredible legs on insects, and wings, and innards. It’s unbelievable,” Lynch says in Jon Nguyen, Rick Barnes, and Olivia Neergaard-Holm’s documentary David Lynch: The Art Life (2016).
The phrase “armed with concrete” was applied to Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman’s contemptible defense attorney, who made the case in his closing argument of the trial that Martin was “armed” with the sidewalk slab to which he momentarily managed to pin his murderer. The attorney even carried a chunk of concrete into the courtroom like a melodramatical bitch.
There would be no performance of fan favorite “HUSHPUPPIES”—no fried fish Friday—after all, it was Saturday.
“Traumatic injury mortality in the Gaza Strip from Oct 7, 2023, to June 30, 2024: a capture–recapture analysis.” The Lancet.
Does anybody know what Quelle’s plans are for all the footage he’s recorded over the last few years? Hopefully he’s composing some Nam June Paik video art shit applied to the Underground Rap Renaissance [U.R.R.].
The words almost felt eulogistic in light of the recently expired Holocaust [RIP].
Saw the show at Daily Op just before this. Elite showmanship from the whole crew