Madlib – Sound Ancestors - 2020 Hip Hop - Audiophile Bernie Grundman - Silver Vinyl - Sealed LP

 

 

Label: Madlib Invazion – MMS 044

Format:

Vinyl, LP, Album, Silver Metallic

Lacquer Cut By – Bernie Grundman

Photography By – Richard Foster

Producer – Madlib

Notes

RSD Essential Indie Exclusive

Barcode and Other Identifiers

Barcode (Scanned (Stickered)): 989327004451

Barcode (Printed (Stickered)): 9 89327 00445 1

Lacquer Cut at – Bernie Grundman Mastering

Country: US

Released: Sep 3, 2021

Genre: Hip Hop

Style: Instrumental

 

 

Tracklist

 

A1 There Is No Time (Prelude) 1:16

A2 The Call 2:05

A3 Theme De Crabtree 2:16

A4 Road Of The Lonely Ones 3:38

A5 Loose Goose 2:21

A6 Dirtknock 2:14

A7 Hopprock 3:27

A8 Riddim Chant 1:58

 

 

B1 Sound Ancestors 2:50

B2 One For Quartabê / Right Now 2:42

B3 Hang Out (Phone Off) 2:15

B4 Two For 2 - For Dilla 2:51

B5 Latino Negro 3:36

B6 The New Normal 2:28

B7 Chino 1:57

B8 Duumbiyay 3:13

 

 

Arranged By, Edited By, Mastered By – Kieran Hebden

 

The two are friends whose recorded collaboration began in the mid-2000s, when Four Tet remixed several tracks from Madlib’s classic MF DOOM collaboration Madvillainy. Hebden’s arrangement of Sound Ancestors shows deep and intuitive engagement with Jackson’s weed-scented sensibility, which has no use for presumptive distinctions between the beautiful and the funky, the silly and the profound.

 

 

 

“Loose Goose,” a delirious early highlight from the album, pairs an enormous dancehall rhythm with a minor-key woodwind line and a repeated sample of Snoop Dogg exclaiming “Fo’ shizzle, dizzle,” before veering hard left into the territory of some faintly demonic, helium-voiced avant-garde pop, then returning to its original groove just in time to end. Immediately after comes the whiplash of “Dirtknock,” built on a loop of tender vocals and bass guitar from the cult-favorite Welsh indie rock band Young Marble Giants, plus a snippet of what I can only guess is a YouTube tutorial about how to properly hit a bong. Of the many mind-expanding contrasts in this passage, the most striking involves the surface quality of the audio: the way the trebly mix of an early 1980s post-punk record sounds especially brittle and tactile when it emerges out of reggae’s subaqueous low end, and vice versa. Madlib’s preference for leaving his samples largely raw and untreated, and his appetite for music across genres, eras, and locales, lead to many such juxtapositions. Recording fidelity is no longer a fixed characteristic of the album as a whole, but an inflection that is subject to change from moment to moment, as mutable and expressive as rhythm or pitch.

 

Despite the album’s frequent joyous and even comic moments, it also has the feeling of an elegy. Its release comes not long after the death of MF DOOM, and one of its tracks is presented as an homage to J Dilla, another collaborator and kindred spirit who died young. “Two for 2 - For Dilla” is a pitch-perfect emulation of the late producer’s style, and serves to highlight the similarities between the two musicians (Sound Ancestors, like much instrumental hip-hop from the last decade and a half, bears more than a little resemblance to Dilla’s 2006 swan song Donuts), but also the differences. Soul samples arrive in herky-jerky staccato, turning half-words and breaks between syllables into unlikely hooks: pure Dilla. But the stretched-out backdrop they punctuate in the track’s second half bears Madlib’s smoky signature, suggesting the sound of Donuts as imagined in a daydream on a lazy afternoon. It would be hard to come up with a more fitting tribute.