In lieu of, uh, painkillers, a lot of the production in early nineties hip-hop is great for taking the edge off. Most of the early backpackers—De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, NYC tragedians Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth—made their mission to cratedig a way to acoustic bliss between dusty jazz records and low slung breakbeats. Rather than snap necks with grand feats of turntablism or crack skulls over blaring horns, producers were intent on rewiring your brain with quiet flicks and vintage pulses.

Listen to Souls of Mischief spacewalk on “93 ’til Infinity.” Eerily adept for a bunch of emcees under twenty, the Oakland natives, anchors of the Hieroglyphics collective, present a pre-millenial study in how to chill on wax. Production-wise, it’s an unimpeded string of green lights: the samples are so doped up, awash in white noise, the emcees can ply seven kinds of cadence without rhythmic slip. A-Plus strafes the insular beat with muted horns and stray piano chirps then floats it in ether. Opio, Phesto, and Tajai slink in like 3AM with some lucid post-drunk, pre-sleep philosophizing. Trading tales in couch-hugging and skirt chasing, smoking and drinking, they project cosmically into A-Plus’ infinite spaces with energy to spare. After all, they’re only chilling.

The Souls find themselves at the foot of the nineties: the future that, for the last thirty years or so, people had been throwing themselves into violent contortions to realize. What they’ve inherited—spaced-out acid jazz records (Billy Cobham and Propositions on this one), Funkadelic’s galactic frontierism, and Afrika Bambaataa’s nu-tribalism—has already become past and the Souls are post. They take to these bigger spaces like EZ chairs, worn plush, as if to suggest that in the future, when all the revolutions are over, there will just be people hanging out.

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