Preservation & Gabe ‘Nandez : Sortilège
Gabe ‘Nandez is the stranger standing at the paved fork in the road. He’s in the club, sober, contemplating his walk home, surrounded by dumb motherfuckers with smartphones. He’s a mysterious soothsayer weaving tangled tapestries of oblique meaning, and he’s a clear-eyed, street-level observer, peering through a layer of smoke at scenes that blur in the background and fade into the dark of night.
For a rapper like Gabe ‘Nandez, whose apocalyptic visions are a dead ringer for the here and now, the haunted atmosphere of Preservation’s production is a perfect fit. The two previously crossed paths on “Sauvage,” a highlight from billy woods’ Preservation-produced 2022 album Aethiopes, offering a small-scale glimpse at what amounts to a brilliant idea on a larger scale with Sortilège.
Preservation and Gabe ‘Nandez operate on a similarly mystical wavelength, surveying an earth still scorching through hypnotic strains of transcontinental psychedelia. Gabe unloads an unbroken string of images on the mesmerizing opener “Spire,” loops of eerie organ and spirals of guitar curling around phrases like “Basilisk in the terrordome, hasten to snapping/Black magic fashion the fabric of what’ll happen.” He doubles down on embracing a shadowy presence through the danger-laced tension of “Bascinet”: “You can’t see me but I’m right here as a ghost part.” Yet the woozy and ominous “Shadowstep” finds ‘Nandez undercutting his philosophical conversation with a girl (“She told me she was surprised my intensity kind of big/Told her, ‘how would you describe what is destiny to a kid?’“) with an unexpectedly horny punchline (“At seven she wore the tight dress, tryna get me hooked/Shit, it worked“).
A small but highly effective pool of guests rounds out Sortilège‘s supporting cast, including woods, who reunites with ‘Nandez and Preservation on “War,” opening his verse with the declaration, “I was born into this, I don’t need a sponsorship.” “Nom de Guerre” finds ‘Nandez passing the mic to Ze Nkoma Mpaga Ni Ngoko, who breathes his own fire en français. But “Mondo Cane,” featuring woods again with his Armand Hammer partner-in-rhyme ELUCID and a hook from Benjamin Booker, is a cosmic, endtimes posse cut, lush and stunning, rife with visions of ruin: “On the edge of the flood/Unleash Armageddon, bleach the sun/Pieces flung, children and body parts, eat the young.”
Preservation’s deep crates of globally sourced obscurities lend Sortilège an added air of strange sorcery, fitting for a record whose title is a reference to divination by random selection. Though even at the ground floor, amid imagery of drugs, sex, crime and racism, ‘Nandez is seemingly always honing his second sight. “My journal burns from the urn of the kernel through its combustion,” he states in “Kurtz,” “Poems, omens and totems, I told ’em the hand who wrote ’em.” Or put more simply in “Lotus Flower,” “these are observations“—snapshots captured from the center of the inferno.
Label: Backwoodz
Year: 2025
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Preservation & Gabe ‘Nandez : Sortilège
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