$777.77, available from Mach’s website The cover art of Mach-Hommy’s 2017 album Luh Hertz is a strange thing. Timberland boots lie on the ground, atop some mangled roses; a flash illuminates the asphalt, throwing it into too-bright relief against the night that is the scene’s backdrop. It is dark and eerie, appropriately so: Luh Hertz is a dark and eerie record. Cold in both senses: wintrous, brumal songs run through with cold-hearted raps. I love records that sound like their covers, and that’s one of the several reasons why I love this album. Mach-Hommy is a mysterious man, and Luh Hertz is perhaps his most mysterious release: eight tracks, cover art, a price tag, and nothing else. No statement from the artist, no physical release that might offer more details, and certainly no lyric sheet, given Mach’s well-known aversion to the practice. Luh Hertz even eschews track titles, settling instead for tally marks—the first track is named ‘x’, the second ‘xx’, up to the final ‘xxxxxxxx’. In addition to, or perhaps because of, the above, Luh Hertz has seen no mention in the press, despite Mach’s 2020 rise to something approaching fame (Mach treats fame, at least the particular and miserable fame traditionally allotted to rappers, like you or I would treat radioactive material.) In short, we have nothing by which to judge Luh Hertz except the music itself. And fortunately it is excellent music, rich and rewarding in its substance and subtle in its execution. August Fanon’s beats are spare yet satisfying, often nearly drumless, guided by crooned vocal samples and doleful piano loops. ‘X’ begins with a sample from Hitchcock’s VERTIGO (1958), then tumbles into a poignant woodwind and piano loop. The influence of Ka is plain to see—Ka and Mach are averred fans of each other, and Mach even references Ka’s “P-90 Protestant” line from Grief Pedigree with a cheeky “Kel-Tec suppressor Presbyterian”.. Like Ka’s best work. Luh Hertz moves quietly but hits hard. It sounds like furtive cigarettes smoked in concrete stairwells, like standing atop a building late at night, watching the New York skyline as it starts to snow. The comparison most often levied at Mach is that of Yasiin Bey (fka Mos Def); it’s not an inapposite comparison, especially on this record, where Mach’s rich baritone thoroughly impresses on several hooks. But it’s Mach’s technical and lyrical ability that anchors Luh Hertz together. Those familiar with his work on 2016’s HBO or 2017’s The G.A.T… know that Mach deals in collage: images flash by, never staying long, images of crack pots and incarcerated moms, of $800 sweaters and spilled Cabernet. Mach sounds weary: the lessons he drops, oblique as they are, carry with them a sense of great tragedy. “I celebrate the simple fact that I survived the 90’s,” he avers on ‘xxxxx’, and I believe him. ‘xxxxx’ itself is the centerpiece of the album, and on it Mach is at the peak of his powers: his rhymes pour out of him calmly but at a furious pace, like DOOM at his best, shifting between plainspoken couplets and dizzying assonance and internal rhyme. “The only place I want to hang in is the MoMA,” he intones, shifting soon to images of shootouts and a drug-smuggler’s regret: “my n****s dump in traffic, whacking the opponents / bet they wish they would’ve run the package back in the Tacoma”. It’s a tour-de-force of a song, elegaic and powerful, a career highlight for Mach and for August Fanon. What criticisms can we levy at this record? It’s short, for one, barely over EP length at twenty-eight minutes. Perhaps most notably, it feels raw—no parts are missing, but the links between them are left unpolished. Beats run long, minutes past the rapping has ceased. There are no features, and Mach’s vocals often go unmixed. The result is an album that feels not like a leak, but something more like a secret, a samizdat, something made for friends to be passed around furtively. In this it feels like a sister work to The G.A.T…, down to their opposite color palettes: both albums are as mysterious as they are lovely, but Luh Hertz is practically the opposite of the upbeat ambience of the other record. Those looking for faultless polish or anything resembling party music should absolutely look elsewhere. In the end, the first speaker on the concluding track 'xxxxxxxx' (a collage of voicemails from fans and fellow emcees) puts it better than I can: “How you living, dogg? What kind of lifestyle you be living that you be saying this crazy shit, dogg?” How, indeed? Mach-Hommy is a mystery, a ghost haunting the industry, someone who wore a mask far before most of us, a man unwilling to compromise his privacy or allow the uninitiated a look behind the scenes. We will likely never know any additional context for Luh Hertz—how it was made, what inspired its dizzying poetry, what prompted its artisans to keep a record this good hidden for that long. Given its rarity, most people will never hear this record, and on one level that’s a tragedy. But those of us with the will to track this record down have the work, and what a work it is. What blank spaces it has are ours to fill in with our enjoyment of this profound, worthwhile music. (来源: This City Of Islands)