- Do you know when The Great Mixtape came out? This time last year. Sampa’s career trajectory has an impressively steep arc. On the snug little stage, which is now hidden in a corner at the end of GOMA’s long gallery, Sampa said it herself: “who can believe all of this came from a single mixtape?”

Well it is the Great mixtape. Despite her modesty Sampa is clearly not short on confidence and why should she be? Her quietly distinctive flow (sometimes with a bit of a Madlib like mannered, nasal drawl, sometimes with just a hint of a pout) is also fast and snappy. She delivers her conscious and politically charged rapping with a power that is never diminished by its restraint. She has good help in the form of her producer and DJ Godriguez (aka Dave Rodriguez): his beats spread across all sorts of styles -boom bap, tribal, afro-futurist- but they’re united by a smoky, mysterious, even a quietly menacing feel.

They bring every bit of it live. They’re nothing short of tight as ****. All the cuts from the mixtape and from that EP of Hiatus Kaiyote remixes. Even in the weirdly bathroom like acoustic of GOMA (all bright, reflective surfaces and great sheets of glass) Sampa works like a well-oiled machine. Actually, the quiet, jazzy qualities of her sound make it susceptible to being perfect incidental music for an art show. That could’ve been really unfortunate, all of the arty intelligentsia sipping their pinot grigio and paying attention to anything but the music.

The room amplified the talking as much as the music, but if you looked, most of the crowd were there to listen and grooving hard. The end feeling was a bit off-kilter though. A lot of Sampa’s music is made up of short (again kinda Madlibish) skittish cuts that work in a mixtape context but are harder to juice much momentum from on stage. More than that though, Sampa always seemed to be expecting more from her audience. There were lots of sing-a-long, call-and-response moments, but the crowd didn’t really give her what she was looking for. Usually I’m totally ready to blame the dunderheads on the dancefloor for screwing up the handclaps, but Sampa was throwing to the room for some pretty complex stuff with little or no explanation of what she was expecting in advance. She was pretty polite about it, but you could just sense that she felt kinda let down all the time. So there was this disconnect that pervaded the show from end to end.

Whatever awkwardness might have been in the room, it sure didn’t extend to Sampa and Rodriguez. The set was succinct but had the relaxed polish of a couple of pros so utterly in their element it wasn’t even a thing.

I wasn’t near ready to finish when the show did. I came away with the sensation that I’d been this close to being a part of something pretty great. I’ll be back again next time to see if I can’t capture that elusive feeling.

- Chris Cobcroft.