The Man With the Most Coats: Cadence Weapon Unveils Forager

New Album Arrives in Style with XXX  

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Tinker, tailored: award-winning rapper/author/producer Cadence Weapon puts on a new suit with Forager, an album that centres fashion history and design. From a Paris mansion overflowing with flowers to the high-end denim collectors of Tokyo, from washing instructions for silk to chromatic devotion as deep as the colour it inspired, Forager is about showmanship and craftsmanship, dedication, the pursuit of beauty and things built to last. 

Forager finds Cadence Weapon as archivist and lyricist, curator and collector. The new songs arethe work of keen eyes and ears, a restless curiosity for depth of knowledge and appreciation for detail. Written alongside his second book, forthcoming “Ways of Listening,” the songs are the natural extension of a curious mind set to the task of expressing the essence of our relationship to music, and how that is changing. 

Grappling with questions of technology and artistic agency, it’s no surprise that Cadence Weapon found himself seeking the same ‘all natural, not synthetic’ approach to this project. Produced by Junia-T,whose adventurous touch brings new dimensions to Cadence Weapon’s notable flow, Forager trades the artist’s signature experimental synth sound for a more organic direction. With his first album featuring completely live instrumentation, the Forager band includes Scott McCannell (bass), Daniel Espina (guitar), Mark Anthony King Edward James (keys), Adrian Irvine (violin), The Chmst (trumpet), Joseph Callender (flute/saxophone) and Chino DeVilla (drums).  

Album opener “Honus” sets the mood. A song about the life cycle of clothing, “Honus” is a reflective and observational starting point, not so much a ‘Who wore it best?’ as it is a ‘Who wore it last?’ type of thought experiment. Throughout Forager, Cadence Weapon explores the parallels between thrifting and digging for records, works of salvage and preservation. 

“Babymoon” continues this more laid-back version of Cadence Weapon, a song as humid, chill and coastal as its Miami setting. This unrushed pace is also present on “Toronto Zoo,” and “Niagara Region,” songs that situate the album in the Golden Horseshoe, a reflection of Cadence Weapon’s current orbit and the album’s origin, with the bulk of the new material being written during an artist residency at Gibraltar Point Centre for the Arts. 

“Raghouse,” featuring vocals by R&B singer Ariel, takes us into the underbelly of the used textile economy, a warehouse where the sheer volume of clothing moved by conveyor belts is both full of promise for the would-be thrifter and completely overwhelming to imagine on a global scale. “One big part of thrifting is the ecological side of it,” says Cadence Weapon. “There is so much clothing out there in the world that was made in the past. True vintage is made from natural materials and was made with a higher standard. This made me think of the classic hip-hop that I grew up listening to.” 

Replete with fashion history and trivia, from “Yves Klein Blue,” on which Cadence Weapon shows off his technical, traditional emcee skills, to “501XX” to “Fall 2012 Couture,” and shaped by the rap greats of his formative years, Forager wears its influences on its sleeve. The album’s lone sample, an excerpt from the 2014 documentary “Blue Gold: American Jeans,” appears on “501XX,” the song that shaped the concept for the project as a whole. 

“Listening back, I subconsciously reference several rappers that I grew up listening to throughout the album,” says Cadence Weapon. “Outkast, RZA, Del tha Funkee Homosapien, MF DOOM, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Aceyalone. I wanted the album to be both a celebration of rap as an art form and a time capsule of my era as a fashion archivist.” 

Forager is out now and is available in limited edition ‘corduroy’ and ‘denim’ vinyl variants. Listen / order here. 

FORAGER MARKETS 

4/25 Hamilton, ON - Cotton Factory with HVC Markets

4/26 Toronto, ON - Standard Time

5/2 Montreal, QC - Essai Futile

5/9 Edmonton, AB - Orange Hall (Strathcona Lodge)

TOUR DATES 

5/7 Montreal, QC - L’Esco w/ Open Mike Eagle 

5/8 Toronto, ON - The Sound Garage w/ Open Mike Eagle