BABYLONS DEATH MACHINE DC duo debuts self-titled album Out Now on DAFA NATION

WASHINGTON, DC - She says: "He has made it to a place of mastery with his beat making. He has the perfect formula to make a universal track. He makes you want to dance." He says: "She is one of the best artists I've ever worked with. I feel like I had to expand a little more. She is an otherworldly emcee." Together, writer and vocalist Eboneé A.D and producer DISCIPLINE99 are BABYLONS DEATH MACHINE.

Beyond the he say-she say, we can say that their self-titled debut project is an otherworldly sonic mechanism that will make you want to dance. Thirty-two minutes spread over thirteen escalating tracks, this music is a boldly efficient, yet brazenly historic statement about possibilities - musical, social, and psychological possibilities.

Once upon a time, there was a dam, a huge dam. But this big dam was no ordinary levee, safeguarding the innocent from a mighty river. No, behind this big dam, there was no water, none at all. Shit, bullshit to be precise, thick, heavy, compacted and stiffened, was the only thing held back by this mighty mythical dam. The bullshit was so thick and so high that it spread out to form a broad plane. So vast and so dense was this plateau of compressed stool, that in time people came and started to live on it. And even though it never stopped smelling like shit, they built giant cities there. Even great principalities were built on this plateau of time-hardened feces. Then one day, BABYLONS DEATH MACHINE came along and blew up the dam. Down the mountain flowed the shit, and the people whose world had been built on bullshit were swept away.

You now have the concept. Let's meet the artists: Vocalist/poet Eboneé A.D writes what she raps and lives what she writes. No, the sister does not intentionally preach from a female perspective. "I try to really write open, where anyone can plug their life in," she tells us, but on this project, she sure comes hard, hard like a woman, on matters of sex and love and mistakes, thereof. Track number five, "PPP (Angie's House)" stands for Passed Planned Parenthood, and it is an unflinching celebration of mamahood. At the same time, it throws a mirror up to a culture that can wage pitched battles for access to the means of life termination, while failing so blatantly at life promotion. And it swings, too. With children or with art, Eboneé operates under what she sees as a duty to create.

In 2019, Ras G (nee Gregory Shorter, Jr.) died suddenly. At the time, the prolifically inventive Los Angeles producer had been working closely with an understudy, a younger dread packing a sequencer and a deep-crate instinct for unusual and funk-fat samples. Not long before his body failed, G had taken DISCIPLINE99 under his wing and into his studio, instructing him in the ways of what the Sun Ra inspired artist called ghetto sci-fi. D99 had just returned from Cali. They were making progress on a collaborative release and then the tragic deviation of Death. Nothing monkey wrenches up a good idea like that motherfucker. DISCIPLINE99 earned the attention of the left coast legend with a flurry of self-published releases going back to 2015, each building space for Black musical history, pop culture trash, the daily news, and conspiracy theories within an eerily familiar chamber of film noir. (Democracy is a conspiracy theory.)

Eboneé - a native of Prince George's County - developed a following as a performance artist and beat producer in her own right with time spent sharpening her art in Orlando, New York, Atlanta, and Dallas.

The two first came to each other's attention at a 2016 Prince tribute concert. By 2019, as Eboneé recalls, they were a thing. They've been loving and creating since, finding space on each other's numerous solo releases for a handful of tight collaborations. But BABYLONS DEATH MACHINE is what Eboneé calls "a smorgasbord of Blackness" - a cinematic epic where madness, violence, and confusion yield to hope, grace, and planetary renewal. The marginalized neighborhoods of Southeast DC and nearby PG are in it, but this ain't no street record you'all. "We are abolishing the war on drugs, the educational system. We're abolishing the food industry. We're abolishing everything. Everything needs to be rewritten right now," DISCIPLINE99 assures us. "Everything needs to be wiped out. So, we can start anew. This experiment has failed."

In this age of identity as politics, our attention as a people is supposed to be folded inward on ourselves and our frustratingly conflicted condition. But on BABYLONS DEATH MACHINE, you'll hear this young duo surgically expose the arteries through which systemic misery circulates into and out of Black bodies and Black lives infecting, in the process, an entire world with a dying empire's noxious taint. Like a hot samurai sword passing through vanilla ice cream, they are, with this musical work, slicing right through that bulging vein, depriving BABYLON and the BABYLONIANS of vampiric sustenance.

Entendre. It's a French verb that means "to hear". Double entendre means to hear something in two ways. Yes, BDM is that life-extinguishing weapon built into this American nightmare, and it is at the same time, within the same deeply held breath, that lethality, reversed, and turned upon whoever built that fucking dam. And it is a record to hear, lush musical architecture (like Dilla or Madlib) that cries out for repeated and immersive listening. D99's cast of characters, extreme rhythmic shifts, and stunning stylistic flips might give you motion sickness if you're not buffering the experience, as he does, with a twisted stalk of good herb. (Fronto, never Backwoods.)

"I think for me, I'm just trying to sum up planetary alignment. You know we're all going through different things, but at the same time we all are experiencing this time, right here. Now!" vocalist Eboneé explains. "What can we do to create unity, what can we do to shift to the next circuit of our brains? We have to get it together. We have to."

DISCIPLINE99 grew up in DC at a time when youth could still find peace from the street in the parks and green spaces that dot that wedge of yet-to-be-gentrified Chocolate City east of the Anacostia River.

"After the internet, everything kind of changed, so to speak. Going outside is not the same thing that it used to be."

Don't you need to go outside, right here, right now? You might have time to relocate your house before this Man and this Woman blow up that dam. After all, to quote one of the voices that floats hauntingly through these mixes: When you're trying to get out of Babylon, where the fuck else you gonna go?

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