Kelpe Cambio Wechsel
English producer Kelpe (a.k.a. Kel McKeown) works in the potentially conservative field of downtempo funk, […]
English producer Kelpe (a.k.a. Kel McKeown) works in the potentially conservative field of downtempo funk, but in his clever hands, the funk is anything but conventional. Although music that springs from hip-hop-centric techniques can fall prey to predictability as much as any other style, Kelpe repeatedly finds fresh ways to tamper with funk’s templates on his third full-length, Cambio Wechsel. Throughout the 12-track album, Kelpe maintains an intuitive psychedelic sensibility along with a disjunctive-yet-hypnotic compositional approach akin to Wagon Christ’s work on his classic 1995 trip-hop opus Throbbing Pouch; both releases have that same restless, ingenious fraying of familiar production tactics that mark them as the work of mavericks.