Chester Watson - Psychic Warfare Department

The compilation album is a rite of passage for all hip-hop producers. Whether it’s Pete Rock’s “Soul Survivor,” Alchemist’s “First Infantry,” Dilla’s “The Shining” or Marley Marley’s “In Control Volume 1,” the calculus is simple: call up the best rappers within your extended crew and ask them to spit flames over hard drums and hypnotic loops. Over the last decade, Chester Watson has dropped five albums and nearly a dozen EPs but the classic production anthology remained a gap in his discography. No longer.

With “Psychic Warfare Department,” the Georgia surrealist has conjured a mutant hybrid, crossing a dazzling array of psychedelic instrumentals, eerie Vincent Price samples, and blistering cameos from a collection of some of the otherground’s finest. Entirely produced by Watson, the Psychic Warfare conscripts include Gabe ‘Nandez, Chuuwee, Marco Plus, Gabe ‘Nandez, Archibald Slim, lojii and more. It’s alternately haunting and head-nodding, an enigmatic portal to the darker side. A masterful nü age horror thriller right in time for the onset of fall.

In Chester’s own words: “the concept of the album spawned from my fascination with occultism and esoterica.

a lot of artists collaborate with artists that fit into whatever world they have built to surround their music and this is no different if not an emphasis

i felt like there was common thread between mëë and my collaborators in that we were all at one point seen as underdogs and may even now be all seen as antiheroes.

observers of life and sayers of the real, no matter how beautiful or ugly that truth is.” - chester watson