No Luck Is Good Luck - 4/12/2007

Vancouver hip-hop trio's instrumental album is loaded with creative charm

By Dennis Romero

Mainstream hip-hop has become such a hollow and overbearing caricature - you know, "gangsters" with no gangs, 22-inch spinners with no destination - that it's easy to forget there's still a thriving indie subculture continuing to produce music in the name of art, instead of in the name of commerce. Lest you forget, hip-hop started as a multicultural street craft - yes, we're talking about that old triumvirate of MCing, DJing, and graffiti, practiced by all manner of inner-city citizens - not as the insincere, thug-worshipping product-placement tool it is today.

Acts such as Vancouver's No Luck Club are helping to keep hip-hop honest, evolving, and artistically relevant. The trio of two turntablists and one laptop-based beat-keeper, veterans of mixing music on radio and in clubs, are about to unleash Prosperity. You might not recognize the collection as hip-hop in the contemporary, BET sense. Sure, nobody smilin', but that's because nobody rapping.

Prosperity is, nonetheless, true to the genre's origins, composed with a postmodern, cut-and-paste method. Dazzling turntable snippets are scratched into atomic particles to create nearly all the bass lines, percussive effects, strings, guitar riffs, and drum rolls. The results include complex, staccato, hard-rocking grooves (the ominous "Corporate Spy Hunter"), bell-bottom jazz romps ("Turntables on the Bayou") and hair-metal deconstructions ("Rock 'n' Roll Monster on Sunset"). The trio clearly works in an improvisational manner (especially live), and Prosperity owes almost as much of its soul to freestyle bebop ("Rear Entry Jazz") as to rap. The only elements missing are a smoke-filled room, a countdown introduction, and an upright bass line to kick things off.

"I've been told that we're not hip-hop," says 34-year-old laptop musician Trevor Chan, who started the group with his brother Matt in 1999. "I don't know. I've got funky breaks, funky beats, samples, spoken word, and you tell me I'm not hip-hop? I'm not interested in copying whatever is out there to sell records and make a buck. I'm interested in trying to push it and make something new."

Prosperity - the second piece of a planned trilogy based on the Chinese concepts of happiness (the title of No Luck Club's 2003 debut album), prosperity, and longevity - explores the Chans' heritage via Chinese gangster-movie samples ("Triad Zone") and political speech snippets. "Our Story" starts with a true speech - "we don't want Chinamen in Canada" - and even lays a little Malcolm X in the mix ("It's time today for us to start doing some standing"). Thank God for public domain. If only mainstream hip-hoppers would wield their tools so satirically, so powerfully.

Yet Prosperity is understated, as well. In the serene "Birds on Parade," the percussion is melodic and fluid while the group's turntable artistry dissolves like a solitary drop of rainwater in an ocean of sound. The whole album, in fact, was designed to keep its turntablism from becoming a circus act. It's a means, not an end.

"We didn't want to beat people over the head with scratch solos," Chan says. "We wanted to be more subtle. Yet most of the instruments and sounds are scratched in. We want to present it as is. We just want to say, hey, this is a good piece of music, period. You don't have to qualify it."

The No Luck Club formed around 1999 when the brothers decided to start making music instead of just playing it on the radio (mainly at Simon Fraser University's CJSF, 90.1 FM, where they still host the hip-hop show Straight No Chaser). The next year, Matt Chan, a turntablist, invited fellow club DJ (and local DMC battle champ) Paul Belen to make it a trio. The three were inspired by hip-hop cut-and-paste luminaries such as DJ Shadow, the Invisibl Skratch Piklz, and Dan "The Automator" Nakamura, who signed them to a short-lived deal with his defunct 75 Ark label. That inaugural journey on a sinking ship had the trio questioning the wisdom of the No Luck name. Relatives were concerned. Fortune is not to be mocked in the sometimes superstitious Chinese culture.

"In Chinese families, there's this thing you can do, which is to hang the good luck symbol upside down to get even more luck," Chan says. "If you say the opposite of what you want, a good thing will happen. No Luck Club is like hanging the good luck symbol upside down. Look at our logo - it's the Chinese good luck sign. Things are turning around for us now."

Viva hip-hop.