81355 @ HI-FI

81355 (pronounced “bless”) is a voltronized collaboration between three of Indianapolis music scene’s elder statesmen; Sirius Blvck, Oreo Jones, and David “Moose” Adamson. While the three have worked together in the past, contributing to one another’s projects as cameos and guest production, this is the first instance in which they have bonded together from conception to execution. The result is the stunning and idiosyncratic debut album under the 81355 moniker, This Time I’ll Be of Use.

These lucid wanderings amongst the street fires, sound like a cross between ghostly Jean-Michel Jarre swirling bossa nova steeped hip-hop beats with acrobatic and surrealist word-play delivered with sharp resolve. While dream-like in its metaphors and abstraction, it doesn’t betray or surrender a present awareness and protest. When asked about the recording process they described it as intuitive, that they each were coming from a synchronistic space, reflecting on Black struggle in the pandemic-ridden and democracy faltering landscape of 2020.

As suggested in the title, they each see themselves entering a new chapter, and claiming a responsibility to bear witness, drawing inspiration from the likes of dancing biting poetic commentary of the late Naptown residents, Etheridge Knight and Kurt Vonnegut. These three musical vagabonds have met up to build a new world, finding even themselves surprised with the results, a collision of styles, moments of time, and cadences, but collaborative output is a sonic and lyrical tapestry rich with vision and style.

Simultaneously mystical and stark, dancing between different and better futures, alternative realities, yet never leaving this one, this travel through temporal realities and parallel universes is matched by the syncopation of both vocal and musical delivery that plays with rhythm, rhyme, melody and meter.