Echo Party

Album Review

It was never supposed to be like this. Echo Party began as the Traffic Entertainment Group label's attempt to help producer, MC, and DJ Edan Portnoy get back in the swing of recording, following the indie success of his 2005 sophomore release Beauty and the Beat and a subsequent slowdown in output. The idea was that he'd be given full access to the label's deep back catalog and draw on it to create a remix album. Two years later, he had finished this: a 30-minute pastiche that not only takes old Traffic releases as raw material, but blends them with newly recorded instruments, effects, and turntablist elaborations to create something entirely new even as it refers constantly to old-school funk and hip-hop. On Echo Party's single uninterrupted track you'll hear vintage hip-hop basslines, 808 beats, and exuberant '80s-style rapping interspersed with weirdness like chopped-up Latin rhythms and shout-outs to New York boroughs and zodiac signs. Too often projects like this end up coming across as overly reverential, but Portnoy strikes a healthy balance between loving respect and creative destruction. You'll hear kazoos and glockenspiels, and you'll hear classic funk being folded, spindled, and mutilated and coming out sounding like nothing you've ever heard before. Echo Party ends up being that rarest of commodities: a party record equally suited to the under 20 and over 40 crowds.