In a world of increasingly pedestrian and piddling hip-hop, Dessa of Doomtree stands as a true visionary, crafting baroque and intricate songs about life and loss and everything in between.
Dessa makes her triumphant return to the High Noon Saloon this Wednesday; by her count it'll mark her sixth visit to the venue. It's no surprise she loves it here—the college crowd is a constant source of comfort for the Minneapolis-based emcee. ""I prefer it when I have my druthers to perform for people who are 18 and over—a lot of my work has a lot of adult themes,"" Dessa said. ""There'll be young professionals and college students and parents of college students, and so far it's worked out well.""
Dessa joined Doomtree, a Minneapolis rap collective with a toe dipped in both the hip-hop and punk cultures, after a lap or two around the Twin Cities' slam poetry circuit. Her work is hyper literate and articulate; powerful, confident and notably singular, even among her crew. ""Right now I'm listening to pianists in an effort to teach my brain the way that melody works, so I'm less likely to be listening to the Replacements than, say, Philip Glass,"" she said of her influences.
The stories the young emcee weaves (and they most certainly are stories in the most earnest sense of the word) straddle the fine line between fact and fiction. ""That's a big part of it; taking a personal experience and putting it in less concrete terms, or taking an idea and housing it in a scene or story"" Dessa said. There's a wistful ambiguity in her words, then, but the beauty and the talent behind them is absolutely unquestionable.
For Dessa, stagnation is not an option. ""In an ideal world I'd push the envelope as far as I'm comfortable, then take all the lessons I've learned from that project and apply it to the next thing,"" Dessa said of her developmental process. ""I'm hoping not to move towards an extreme, but rather to get a wider wingspan. Then when I'm tackling any single song I can decide, ‘hey, this needs a crazy synthetic bassline, or let's bring in a Chinese violinist,' because I'm familiar enough with the pallet of sound.""
Dessa recently released Castor, The Twin, a set of reworked songs from her debut False Hopes EP and her consistently dazzling full-length, A Badly Broken Code. The album replaces the beats and synthetic sounds of the original songs with new, organic arrangements like those she's been using on tour.
""On Castor it's string sections and grand piano, and vibraphone and mandolin and you just turn to 11 on this organic, quiet, patient instrumentation,"" she explained. ""After working a lot with studio stuff, I kind of want to figure out, like, what kind of instrument is the stand up bass? What kind of sounds can it make? What is the piano? What does it sound like when you play a guitar song on piano?""
What's next for the rising star, then? ""There's an album that comes out in 2012 that hopes to draw from everything, from simple love ballads to raging rap manifestos,"" Dessa excitedly confirmed. ""Doomtree has been working really hard for most of 2011 working on an album called No King, coming out Nov. 22. It's the most collaborative record yet, and it's really weird [laughs]. It's cool, and it's weird and bold and beautiful. It's going to be dope.""
Dessa plays at the High Noon Saloon Wednesday, Oct. 12 at 9 p.m.
