A lot of this Festival is about listening. So is the instrumental
hip hop created by no luck club. That's why brothers Trevor and Matt
Chan, and Paul Belen were part of last year's Collaboratory. For a
group that had never worked with acoustic musicians before, or even
attended a folk festival, agreeing to take part was a great leap of
faith that said a lot to me about their creative approach as artists
and music lovers. Over the winter I went to see them perform several
times and was more deeply impressed each time with the depth,
complexity and full-on groove they could throw down. (Note: In the
interest of full disclosure, I should mention that my Muse is bonkers
about nlc. We started talking about a special project for this summer's
Festival. For more on that, see Folk 109 below.)

Their parents watched Trevor and Matt, and Paul, head off to
university, hoping they would apply themselves studiously to becoming
doctors, lawyers or accountants, but didn't factor in the unique
attractions of campus radio. Trevor and Matt started spending more and
more time around the station, working on shows and listening to the
latest hardcore, hip hop and every other kind of music on offer.
Ultimately they fell under the spell of the Bomb Squad, the production
team of Public Enemy, who were in the process of changing the sound of
hip hop forever.

You can still hear some Bomb Squad in their work today. nlc's music
is a dense sonic wonderland where scratches, samples and melody lines
roll together with a love of old-school funk. It's smart, it's fun and
it kicks. There's a big difference between a beat and a groove, and nlc
draws on a groove 40 years long, reaching back to Stax, Sly, Say It
Loud, and all the way up to the state-of-the-art right now. It's a
groove that has never forgotten its roots in the rise of hip hop: the
sound of the dance parties in the Bronx that went out to all kinds of
chocolate cities and those vanilla suburbs.

You'll also find other history in nlc, rare sounds plucked out of a
North American popular culture where Asians appeared only as
caricatures drawn from racist ignorance. Having grown up in that
hyphenated-Canadian way, they can also drop Asian film and other
popular culture into the mix to create instrumental hip hop that has a
lot to say about our city in 2006. -DS

Visit this artist's website at www.noluckclub.com