Rhys Langston – I’m running for senate

Last year’s “Pale Black Negative”, which counted Ate the Tuning Fork While I Taxied in the Crepuscular (W10) among its singles, was produced by Rhys Langston himself. On “I’m running for senate” the beat comes from BLOOMCYCLE, a shift, and the experimental footprint stays intact. It’s the second single release from “to live and die in end user license agreements”, a 12-track, multi-producer album out 9 October, Langston’s 33rd birthday, through his own Black Market Poetry imprint, with the vinyl on Fused Arrow Records.

The words are a mock campaign speech: a résumé built from sports-draft and pop-culture punchlines, a roll call of revolutionary and rap-history name-drops, real policy talk mixed with impossible finance, a bawdy running joke about an aide, and breakfast plans that get less plausible by the line. It closes on the candidate as a benchwarmer, joking that a pension will never arrive. The track sets that irony against eroding civil liberties and the spread of surveillance tech. New hands on the beat, same restless mind at the mic, and anyone who loved “Pale Black Negative” has nothing to worry about.