Music

A Japanese producer remade Kanye West's new album without hearing it

by Jeremy Mersereau

Though he’s since gone back on his word, many international Kanye West fans were sadly missing out on hearing his latest opus The Life of Pablo due to his now-tarnished TIDAL brand loyalty, since the streaming service isn’t available worldwide.

Many of them had to resort to less-than-legal means of hearing Kanye rap about making smoothies/movies over obscure, expertly-curated samples.

Japanese producer TOYOMU wasn’t one of them, though. Instead, sourcing the lyrics from Genius and the samples from WhoSampled, the inventive musician crafted his own vision of Kanye’s seventh studio album, Imagining “The Life of Pablo”, with the help of a speech synthesizer, and gave the world his best shot at envisaging the whole thing, independent of the source material and Kanye’s brainwaves:

TOYOMU gets surprisingly close to the real deal on some tracks (just check out his near-identical Arthur Russell sample interpolation on “30 Hours”), but for the most part, ITLOP sounds like transmissions from an alien universe… one where boastful beings with planet-sized egos are still a thing, and they sound like text-to-speech programs.

“In Japan, we couldn’t listen to TLOP officially because of Tidal. Subscription services in Japan are too slow, most people are still using iTunes and buying CDs. I thought it might be a good idea to make the whole album without listening to it,” TOYOMU told Pigeons and Planes.

Next up: TOYOMU’s version of Weezer’s Songs from the Black Hole, God willing.