Now that the phrase “Where you at?” has taken on a whole new, post-Katrina meaning, it’s worth sending out the call for Sleek and Horizon, former rulers of the Hi-Ho Lounge scene, who dropped this impressive 15-track CD before the storm hit. DJ Horizen has a real knack for dramatic piano flourishes, sampled and otherwise, and that gives Sleek’s Eminem-without-the-camp flow just the right resonance. “I got Beethoven movin’ so I don’t ever stop / girl down, skirt round your knees, holding my cock,” he explains on “Ticker Tape Parade,” and that pretty much sums up the feel of this album. Did I say without camp? Without as much camp.

While not quite as creative as their Media Darling compadres, this duo walks a fine line between indie smarts and major-label massacre. “Fortune Cookie Talk” layers a jazzy sample with bargain-basement fake ivories and a few left-turn flourishes, but the result is true to the winkingly philosophical title, the “cheap wisdom” of lines like “You can never go without if you always go within.” Horizen’s dirty Dollar General discoveries are there to set the mood, not to establish tonality, although the vocal snatches and intermittent Latin fantasias on “Two In The Morning” and the brilliant theft of Electric Light Orchestra’s “Tightrope” intro on “Sixth Symphony” should be arresting enough to trip up any hip-hop fan. The closing quartet of songs – “100 Byproduct Bass,” “Fantasyland,” “Sun Godz,” and “Tale of Two” get a little deeper into the hood than the ’burbs, but Horizen always keeps it classy. Or, rather, classical.

The result is a record that has one hand in the underground and one mic in the mainstream. New York transplant Sleek’s happily unaffected vocals and rhythmically complex yet never pandering rhymes use the paucity of the local scene, more often than not, as a jumping-off point for his own boasts and his own polemics. “Kill the philosopher,” he chants at the end of “Symphony.” Let’s hope not.