PYRAMIDS WITH SOUND

PYRAMIDS WITH SOUND

LINER NOTES

written by: BUSHMEAT SOUND

The labor of art is like slavery, but slaves can run away. Artists find liberation in the toil of their art, but the labor of moist creation comes with its own inescapable bonds.

2025 opened with America (the beautiful?) reeling from a self-inflicted wound. A headshot –yes, definitely, but really just a flesh wound. What loss is an ear for those who don’t listen? BABYLONS DEATH MACHINE and their self-titled debut album materialized just as magamadness was rebooting this society to its original default settings. So, you cannot be surprised that this unprecedented year of smoke and mirrors, oil and ICE, masked men and cowboy-hatted women closes with BDM’s potent and well-aimed NON-MONOTONIC. If you only get one shot, you better take your time. A single calendar year of disciplined and precise construction was about all it took for DAFA Nation to erect another pyramid. With NON-MONOTONIC, the production team of Eboneé A.D and Discipline99 have simultaneously exposed the existential wound of Blackness and its irrevocable promise of redemption through invention. There’s no waste in NON-MONOTONIC’s four global-local thundering tracks. Nothing is more local than that space between your ears, and BDM fills that with organic beats, black language, and black myth.

The mystery of Black survival in the face of an enemy that has spent so much of its treasure and genius to destroy us is a legendary engine for creation. If this music can still be called hip hop (and it can), then here, in the opening months of 2026, we have been gifted with the sonic crystallization of hip hop’s entelechy, its vital creative purpose, its blackadelic aesthetic nut. More than just measuring the depth of the hole or counting the shadows amongst us, NON-MONOTONIC is that conscious rap record that points out at the same time that it points forward. In times like these, they are exactly the same direction.

2025 was the tipping point. We’re never going back. Slaves could not be away from their owner’s premises without permission; they could not assemble unless a white person was present; they could not own firearms; they could not be taught to read or write, nor could they share or possess any literature; they were not permitted to marry, only to mate. BABYLONS DEATH MACHINE surgically extracts slave codes tucked beneath our nappy scalps by an educational system designed by the same villains that built the courts and the prisons. These children of the Sun may live eternally, if BDM’s cosmic works prevail and the science of sweet music and true words march the pirates and their presidents off the edge of the world. “Like life lasts forever,” Eboneé raps on "Quiet Exit”. It does, and your destiny awaits your attention. Listen.

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