Listening to music can be a way to do it. Few artists understand this better than Madlib. Over dozens of releases and nearly as many egos, West Coast hip-hop producer, DJ, multi-instrumentalist, and de facto investor-born Otis Jackson Jr. has worked tirelessly to extract popular albums from his collection, inviting listeners to hear what he hears: a unique emotional texture seo a distinctive vocal line, saxophone solo drawn to the most elegant single bar. Madlib puts these moments at the heart of our attention, relentlessly and alively, to ignore the impossible importance to those of us who might otherwise miss out. Cue up one of his beats side by side with his store stuff and you might be surprised at what it looks like. But such an attempt at interpretation would miss the point of his music. Some manufacturers specialize in handling the sample until anonymity; for Madlib, the hearing itself – the observation – is as important as anything that happens next.
Sound Ancestors, his new album, a rare record in his large catalog that is recorded just as a Madlib solo release, is not a collaboration with a rapper, or an album by one of several fake jazz players and ensembles he has created. , or an entry in a subject series arcane. But it is also a collaborative effort, this time with Kieran Hebden, the electronic producer better known as Four Tet, who has preserved, edited, and arranged his 16 tracks from a group of hundreds of records. sent to him by Madlib over a period of two years. Their process reminds me of 2003 Blue Shadow, created by Madlib by crushing the cellars of Blue Note Records, sometimes cut the original jazz records intricately and sometimes allowed them to open for long pieces without much editing. Now, Madlib is the one who opens his archives, and Four Tet is the one who listens and collects.
The two are friends who began the recorded collaboration in the mid-2000s, when Four Tet redesigned several tracks from Madlib’s classic MF DOOM collaboration. Madvillainy. The arrangement of Hebden de Sound Ancestors reveals a deep and intuitive connection with Jackson’s delicate knitting sense, which has no need for ethical distinctions between the beautiful and the funky, the silly and the deep.
“Loose Goose,” an early premiere from the album, repairs a large dance rhythm with a small-key wood-ash line and a re-enactment of Snoop Dogg shouting “Under the shizzle, dizzle,” before looking hard at him leave into the area of some somewhat demonic avant-garde pop, with a helium voice, and then return to its original pit just in time to finish. Just after that comes the whiplash of “Dirtknock,” built on a loop of tender vocals and bass guitar from Welsh indie rock band Young Marble Giants, as well as a snippet of what I can only believe YouTube tutorial on how to i can do it right. hit bong. Of the many mind-blowing variations in this passage, the most striking is the surface quality of the audio: the way the awesome mix of early post-punk recordings in the 1980s sounds particularly brittle and crisp when it emerges from the subaqueous bottom of reggae, and vice versa. Madlib prefers to leave his samples largely raw and untreated, and his interest in music across local genres, times and places, leads to many such performances. Recording fidelity is no longer a feature based on the record as a whole, but an inflection that can change from minute to minute, as smooth and meaningful as rhythm or pitch.
Despite the album’s humorous and even humorous moments, there’s a deadly feel to it as well. It will not be released shortly after the death of MF DOOM, and one of his tracks is presented in homage to J Dilla, another collaborator and kind spirit who died young. “Two for 2 – For Dilla” is a perfect reflection of the late producer’s style, and highlights the similarities between the two musicians (Sound Ancestors, like many hip-hop instruments from the last decade and a half, it sounds a bit like Dilla’s 2006 swan song Donuts), but also the differences. Soul samples reach herky-jerky staccato, turning half-words and breaking between syllables into an indistinguishable hook: Pure Dilla. But on the extended back they punch in the second half of the track is Madlib’s smoky signature, suggesting a sound Donuts how he would think in a day on a lazy evening. It would be difficult to make a more appropriate suggestion.
One emotional peak comes through “Hopprock,” a track where little construction seems to be taken: a guitar with a palm, a simple drum line, a snippet of bass that appears in every few bars. Several ghostly voices float at the edges, feeling more like Four Tet’s previous work than Madlib did. Their words are almost unrecognizable: a yes here, a dè! then, a little ooohs between. Together, these elements evoke a feeling that none would call alone. Listening in the right mood feels like watching the sun rise over a mountain.
Throughout his catalog, Madlib has maintained a strong relationship with authority, enjoying his ability to leave you wondering who exactly is doing what, and when. On a series of jazz concerts featuring Otis Jackson Jr. playing many or all of the live instruments himself, he has taken on a series of fanciful aliases: Yesterday ‘s New Quintet, Sound Directions, Ahmad Miller, The Last Electro-Acoustic Space Jazz & Percussion Ensemble. Whatever other roles these characters serve in their process, they also gain ranks of value in musical creativity. He’s happy to take credit for a record that a traditionalist could write as plagiarism on other people’s work – but when playing bass, drums, percussion, kalimba, synth, organ, electric piano? That wasn’t Madlib, that was Monk Hughes & the Outer Realm.
Sound Ancestors accessible in more subtle ways. “Duumbiyay,” his elegant final track, features a grim baby voice and a hard-recorded jazz combo working together. When a piano enters the mix and sticks out a two – note figure that just mirrors the singer ‘s exclamatory phrase at the end of a line, the moment is quite frightening. The voice and the sound instrument are as if recorded in different decades, perhaps on different continents. As the track progresses, their involvement becomes closer: the piano seems to accompany the singer deliberately, co. -like the simple melody with the left-hand bassline and close-up chords, as if in the same room. We may hear the magic of two musicians arriving unnoticed over time and space; maybe Madlib played the piano himself to an old field recording he likes, or maybe he hired a session musician to do it. The weird mix of fidelity is probably all cooked up in one incomparable sample, and it just lets him play. Whatever the answer, the effect is the same. Hey, thu, the music shouts. Listen to this.
Buy: Rough Trade
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