Sufjan Stevens Gets a Gangsta Lean: Illinoise, Mashed Up

While Sufjan Stevens is busy trying to figure out what the hell to do with all those incredible, awesome, too-long-for-some-people-but-really-well-worth-the-wait few pieces of new material, we're stuck with nothing! BQE's orchestrations are nice twee background music if you're on a particularly light trip of mushrooms, but other than that, we need our fix, Soof. Well, we got it -- the Sufjan finally got mixed up with some hip hop. How is it?

Pretty damn good! Some crafty individual named Tor took the quintessential, more quiet tracks from seminal Sufjan album Come On, Feel The Illinoise, and threw some backpack rap over them, putting breakbeats and lyrics over the base instrumentations and making Sufjan the hook on most. It is, for all intents and purposes, in theory and execution, pretty goddamn genius. We like. Highlights are the “Stars of Wonder” remix with Aesop Rock’s “None Shall Pass,” and chronically underrated Outkast track “Wheelz of Steel” thrown against Stevens’ “Dumb I Sound.” If you want to know who the real Outkast fans are, ask them about their favorite five Outkast songs: if “Wheelz” isn’t one of them, they don’t know what they’re talking about. This Tor guy does, and it shows in both choice and execution. Make this one a listen today. Would love to see what he would’ve done with the louder Sufjan “bangers,” but this isn’t worth kvetching over. It’s really that good. The site’s here, you can download it here.