Entry 603 - Onra - Chinoiseries - Part 1

 

Style: Instrumental hip hop, beats

Primary Emotions/Themes: East Asian cinema, tributes to the past

Thoughts: I've been on record saying a few things in the past:

1) I love instrumental hip hop
2) It's really hard for me to get into the lo-fi variation of the genre

These two statements seem to be in direct conflict with each other, yet they both hold true. There are of course overlap between the two that I enjoy greatly, but those albums are few and far between. 

Onra's trilogy of Chinoiseries albums are a rare gem. As I understand it Onra obtained a bunch of abandoned records from Vietnam for this record. He sampled them and put beats to them to create the final product that is Chinoiseries Part 1. 

From the source material the music is inherently low fidelity. The records that these songs are created from have pops, poor recordings, and tons of surface noise. So that begs the question, is this actually part of the lo-fi hip hop genre?

Even though this has a lot in common with lofi hip hop I don't think it's part of the genre. Lofi has a very particular sound that permeates the genre. Chinoiseries sounds fundamentally different to my ears. Where lofi has a predictable beat pattern, Onra has creative and varied beats. Where lofi has obvious loops that are repeated several times in various patterns, Onra takes a single theme and works with it for 30-120 seconds before moving on to the next sample. Each song is it's own focus, nothing interferes. 

While Onra clearly has a superior sound to most lofi, it's not without fault. The album is 48 minutes long but still feels like it drags sometimes. Some themes overstay their welcome by just a bit, even if the track is only 90 seconds long. There is little to no progression for any of the songs or the album as a whole. It feels like it's a snapshot into a style of forgotten music rather than an album as a whole. Not inherently a bad thing, but it's something I had to get used to when listening. 

I've been waiting for this album to have a repress for at least three years. I discovered the trilogy shortly after the initial pressing sold out and the price skyrocketed. I settled for getting the tapes instead. Now though, they have been repressed and I love that I can finally have them. These are the kinds of additions to my collections that make it one step closer to complete.

Written November 14th 2023