Album Of The Week: Ka The Night’s Gambit

A week and a half after Jay-Z's Magna Carta Holy Grail went out to a million Samsung users, another long-pedigreed Brooklyn rapper found an unconventional way to release an album. But this one was different: A few cardboard boxes of CDs and vinyl, carted out to a West Village street corner. Before the Brownsville rapper/producer Ka released The Night's Gambit, his new self-produced LP, on iTunes or anywhere else, he was out there on the concrete, and he chose his location carefully, standing outside the former site of the storied Manhattan underground-rap emporium Fat Beats. That's a symbolic and pointed bit of positioning -- Ka painting himself as an avatar of keep-the-faith old-head hip-hop values -- and maybe an implicit rebuke to Jay's corporate empire-building. "Off The Record," the last song on the album, does something similar, weaving in the names of scores of classic rap albums, the same way GZA once incorporated as many record-company names as possible on "Labels." But if Ka really wants us to see him as an old-school fundamentalist, he may be doing himself a disservice. The Night's Gambit is actually something way more fascinating: A deeply psychedelic rap album, one that sounds like the drifting noise within one man's head.