Madlib - Sound Ancestors

January 29, 2021 - Madlib Invazion/Text Records

It is increasingly difficult for artists to maintain the attention of their audience. We’re all so wrapped up in the flow of the almighty algorithms, mindlessly scrolling, endlessly searching for food in an empty refrigerator, rarely stopping long enough to give a piece of culture the complete digestion it deserves. Music as a format is particularly easy to bring along with us everywhere we go. It plays in the background as we work or study, it plays in the background as we shop along to RPMs designed to keep us buying things. It is used to lull us to sleep, to lull us to march, to calm us down, to pump us up for a workout. And we also go beyond the music itself, using the idea of music as a way to verify our identity, to label ourselves in relation to others, to prove that we are in the know and therefore have the social capital we need to establish ourselves as dominant animals at a post-animal watering hole of sorts. 

What I love most about the songs on megalith producer Madlib’s new project Sound Ancestors is that they demand more from us than all the aforementioned uses we have in our lives for “music.” You can’t put them on in the background and expect to get any work done. They command your attention because they are built from pure expressive energy and an expansive artistic freedom that only a prolific and visionary producer who’s been gathering sounds and experimenting with ideas for a career spanning three decades can carry. The music was made by Madlib, aka Otis Jackson Jr. among many other personas and projects his ears have touched, and the collection was curated, edited, arranged and mastered by Keiran Hebden, aka Four Tet, our favorite sound collector and music geek. It might seem like an odd pairing when you are thinking in the language of genre boxes. But both of these artists have built a practice out of listening more closely to the sounds of this world than the rest of us, collecting the nuance, and creating rich work out of that superior attention to detail which sets them apart and changes how we hear music. 

The collaboration was inevitable. Its goal was to create a culmination of all Madlib’s interests into one cohesive body of work and release it as a single project, without any other constraints or any intention for the work to be used later as beats underneath a rapper or singer’s words. Madlib’s career has been highly variable, collaborative and project-oriented. He rarely stays put in one place for long. You can hear the many musical lives he’s lived in Sound Ancestors. It maintains its own cohesion and integrity, even though you’ll at times hear funk guitar, snippets of found conversation, vintage soul samples, rap samples, jazz combos, Latin guitar riffs, kazoos, congas, etcetera, etcetera. He’ll lay down an idea, create a convention, allow you to settle into it, then he’ll break it just when you start to get comfortable, with a sudden and jarring funk guitar breakdown or a sudden and complete fadeout or a mood swing mid-track before the tension of the first mood has peaked. I think these moments of change are designed to make sure we are not only still listening, that we are actively paying attention to what he is showing us. It’s a very aggressive approach to composition, a sort of hyperactivity and mania. Can you really blame him? We settle into comfort so easily. Madlib isn’t here to give us space to contemplate and rest. Music for him is energy, creation, expression, not rest and relaxation. It is active, constantly changing, and alive. 

It would be a waste of time that misses the point entirely for me to list out samples and their sources and deeply unpack all the different sounds you will hear listening to Sound Ancestors. Its purpose as a piece of art out in this world is to show us listeners how Madlib hears and how he presents what he hears in an optimum form for us to receive it. In the following I’ll share with you my album highlights, but you won’t be able to simply read about this music and understand it enough to talk about it at a dinner party as a way to impress others. 

Rap samples and space radars in an incomplete vacuum make up the fabric behind a hip hop melody in kazoo on ‘Loose Goose,’ to an effect that, when coupled with the track title and a clear-as-day sample of Snoop Dogg saying, “fo’ shizzle, dizzle,” does sound cartoon bird-like. Despite all the cheese, it defies the laws of cooking and is not a cheesy dish. It’s like Madlib baked some macaroni and cheese, but it tastes like something so completely new and exciting in your mouth that you forget how good cheese is. I particularly love when the fabric starts to unravel a bit midway through the song, one of those tonal shifts I mentioned earlier as an attention-getting device. The song’s break opens up to a bit of chaos. More and more vocal samples are added, becoming a sort of a collage of humanity that’s greater than the sum of its parts. There’s so much energy all of a sudden, like you’re hearing this consistent rhythm in a room full of people exclaiming themselves separately. The trumpets playing the chromatic scale is an especially nice moment. 

‘Hopprock’ has a literal process story to it. It starts off with a chill cello, and some free percussive exploration that hangs on the edge of a rhythm. There are so many sounds here, like listening to a kid in a room full of instruments who gets to touch whichever one they want to, and they make a noise with each one to see what it sounds like. There are chimes, rainsticks, taps and hollow drums, all in a sort of strange purgatory of potential energy. Then you hear a sample of a recorded robotic voice as someone deletes the voicemail messages from their cell phone to make room for something which eventually reveals itself to be the drop of the rest of the track. My overactive mind was so excited by the conceptual value of this moment I just had to point it out to you, dear reader. The rest of the track soars in a groove of peak emotional abandon (broken at times of course, since we can’t get complacent), driven by a bubble staccato melody, clapping hands, and a collage of vocal samples like a face made out of 1000 faces.  

‘Riddim Chant’ has me obsessed with a small voice sample of what sounds like someone saying, “hey,” but it’s cut in half so that it’s barely an audible breath out. It’s a moment that could only be created with machinery, and it’s something that, like microexpressions in the human face, we never would or could have considered without a recording of some sort. The sample is used as an intermittent percussion, and if I had a guess, I would say it is the reason this song was made. This cutting single-syllable words in half is a strategy seen throughout the album, and it really makes you appreciate just how closely Madlib is paying attention to the sounds he puts in his tracks. 

The album’s final track ‘Duumbiyay’ juxtaposes a child singing with the freedom of jazz piano chords. It’s a surprising combination, and it reveals that, even in what we see as the simplest of musical formats, the singsong songs of kids on playgrounds around the world, there is a level of complexity that rivals what is often considered the headiest of musical formats, freeform jazz. What a brilliant combination that leads to an unexpected but explicit revelation. We should know this truth, but we always forget for some reason. 

Madlib and Four Tet’s Sound Ancestors is a feast for the ears that asks us to wake up in order to be fed. It demands undivided attention and gives great rewards. We can either stay and listen or turn it off hungry. No more endless staring at the contents of an empty refrigerator. We have to make the decision to go out and hunt for our dinner if we want to be satisfied. ☔