Slicker's Plan 'We All Have A Plan' album

Slicker's got a plan. Having grown up on hip-hop's collages, indie-punk's bedroom DIY-isms and the beat fantasias of electronic composers, John Hughes (a.k.a. Slicker and the artist behind Chicago's Hefty Records) has grasped something most others haven't in his knitting together of something old and something new.

For Hughes, the common chord on We All Have a Plan, Slicker's fourth album and a pan-global, soul-jazz masterpiece made out of bits and pieces, is elemental and spiritual.

"Honest" and "organic" are words Hughes uses repeatedly to describe the joyful digitalia of his blueprint. And in the wake of similar cut-and-paste excursions by kindred spirit colleagues, We All Have a Plan smuggles modern electronics away from indie-techno dilettantes and overcrowded dance-floors, back to the timeless land of song.

It has taken the 27 year-old Hughes a while to return here, though his creative life has been driving him in this direction all along. From the childhood daze of a backseat imagination --"In my parent's car on the highway, I was making beats timed to each light post we'd pass" -- through an adolescence filled with Kraftwerk, Yello, Herbie Hancock, and Grandmaster Flash, futuristic music was always John's wellspring.

So was the creative example and encouragement set by his father John, who ranks among the most distinctive American filmmakers of the 1980's. Besides outlining the pathos of teenage America, films like The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller's Day Off relied on music, especially post-punk, pre-alternative music full of synths and computers to be an essential component of storytelling. "My first impression of music was how it related to visuals," Hughes says of his time spent in editing rooms. "I still draw a lot of that experience back to my music. It's what molded me."

Hanging out in post-production studios furthered Hughes' tech-heavy musical explorations. "I wasn't the guy playing out in bands," he says. "I was sitting at home making beats, sound collages, and recording bands, trying to get that side of my craft together." Along the way, high-school exposure to the immediacy of lo-fi experiments of Sebadoh and pre-Dinosaur Jr. changed the way Hughes thought about recorded music and lead him to form Bill Ding, an indie-electronic band that not only fostered his music's evolution, but also gave him a reason to start Hefty Records.

Originally founded in 1995 to release Bill Ding records, Hefty added focus to Hughes' music by contextualizing it. Aligning with musicians also inspired by hip-hop and electronic processes, and indie mind-sets (people like Scott "Prefuse 73" Herren, Telefon Tel Aviv T.Raumschmiere and Matmos) gave a strength-in-numbers aura for the new kind of music the label put forward. A non-acerbic electronica made for living rooms not clubs, in which live instruments mixed with beats and samples for an anything-goes feel that hinted at beat-minded, electric jazz.

This, then, was the vibe of Slicker's 1998 Confidence in Duber (which was followed by a remix EP) and 2001's more laptop-oriented The Latest. Yet by the end of making the latter, Hughes's most computer-dominated work, his script was beginning to change: "While mixing the record I was looking ahead to the next one and decided I wanted to make a broader statement. I wanted to create imagery using music."

We All Have a Plan ties it all together. An exercise in fatherhood music (Hughes has a two-year old daughter), it is also Hughes's attempt "to make something that was rootsy, filled with universal concepts and primitive sounds. Sounds that on their own would catch even my daughter's ear. A futuristic and forward-thinking record that captured the traditional spirit from snippets of old music." Except that the album contains no samples.

The collaborative voices and jazz tones you hear throughout the record belong to soul, jazz, funk and Afro-Beat music's forgotten heroes. Legendary Motor City funk-jazz cats Phil Ranelin and Wendell Harrison illuminate the laid-back funk collage of "God Bless This Mess, This Test We Pass" and its reprise "Straight Mess," and add lift to the downbeat jazz of "Village Plate Dub." Vocalist Khadijah Anwar, once a 14 year-old soul wunderkind for mid-'70s funkateers Sugar Hill, shines on the Zapp-like electro-funk of "Knock Me Down Girl" and re-imagines Herbert's micro-house on the title cut, while Detroit MC's Phat Kat and Elzhi (of Slum Village fame) add a future urban element to the proceedings. Singer Lindsay Anderson (L'Altra, Telefon Tel Aviv) gives "A Strong Donkey" a sultry jazzed-out bliss, while guest vocalist/trumpeter James Cromwell grumbles alongside her mellifluous delivery. Also appearing on the title song, and throughout the Plan, is Dan Boadi, a Ghanaian vocalist residing in Chicago, who Hughes estimates affected the album as much as anyone.

"Dan brought a certain optimism to the project. He's a cab driver in Chicago and on the side he runs a network of musicians from Ghana, finds them gigs.," explains John. "In Ghana, he did a couple of successful records, so for him to get back into the studio and explore my ideas, was really exciting. His is a different kind of spirit than the people I'm used to working with, people my age. He got me really excited about what we were doing together. So when Dan left the studio, that feeling definitely lingered."

It, of course, shows. Spiritual X-factors all-too rarely affect the soul and creation of computer music. Yet these are undeniably the guiding forces behind Slicker's We All Have a Plan. So natural and soul-kissed, you'd think they were part of Hughes's plan all along.

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Slicker's Plan - We All Have A Plan