This Week's Essential Reading
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10 Saturday, June 16, 2012 www.thenational.ae The National thereview The National thereview Saturday, June 16, 2012 www.thenational.ae 11 this week’s essential reading ‘ Neither sand nor sea’ by Behind Bob Marley stood The Wailers. Behind The Wailers stood Jamaica. Excellent { Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, music { LA Review of Books essay on the island and reggae music pegged to a film and two biographies playlist From Prince Far l to Pablo and Perry: more adventures in Jamaican sound A special The Congos Heart of the Congos (Blood and Fire) The classic that established The Congos as otherworldly heroes, this album seems to sound off on a slightly different frequency than kind of brew all the rest. It will get The Congos’ sound stuck in your head with no hope of ever shaking out. Lee Perry & Friends The Singles Collection: Anthology 1968 to 1979 (Trojan) This two-CD compilation gathers some of the most brilliant and idiosyncratic productions of Lee “Scratch” Perry, whose work with The Congos in the 1970s happened alongside similar This surreally beautiful collaboration between the reggae studio sessions with Bob stalwarts The Congos and the US indie underground artists Marley and numerous others. Sun Araw and M Geddes Gengras is accompanied by a film that chronicles their work together, writes Andy Battaglia Augustus Pablo “Music can take us all around the self – a singular masterpiece that tronic beat and smears of weight- King Tubbys Meets Rockers world.” As statements of artistic endures in its own realm, both real less guitar are greeted with the Uptown (Shanachie) intent go, this one might not seem and imagined. sound of The Congos alone with destined to linger. We’ve heard But the roots of all that date back a microphone. Footage in the film Mellow and spacious, it many times before, and usu- to 35 years ago, while the senti- shows them each in such a state, relaxed but wildly alive with a ally with such a void of meaning ment in question – “music can focused on something unseeable persistent sense of mystery, and conviction that it can be hard take us all around the world” – is Sun Araw, M Geddes Gengras and The Congos. RVNG Intl and seemingly floating on their Augustus Pablo’s classic to hear at all. But it sounds differ- of a more recent vintage. It figures feet after spells of ceremonial matches snaky melodica- ent issuing from the mouths of prominently on Icon Give Thank, a ganja-smoking. Their eyes slowly playing to wowing dub effects The Congos, a group of musicians new album created in collabora- Cameron Stallones) got together a moving mosaic whole. The tech- The music on the record shares revel in abstracted sounds: guitars close, and their dreadlocks reach (echoes, EQ shifts, abstracted who by all indications have been tion between the now-elder Con- with a friend and found himself nique draws from a long lineage of with the film a sense of coming- processed to sound like they’re out all around them. drum breaks) put in place around the world a few times over. gos and Sun Araw and M Geddes on a plane to Jamaica. experimental film, but the effect of together in a series of fleeting and dripping, drum machines that Their voices are still as singular The Congos are a reggae group Gengras, two much younger musi- Footage from a flight into King- it is decidedly earthy, unaffected, fitful moments meted out in real move in and out of time, keyboard as any ever recorded, and they stir by genre mastermind King whose hallmark album Heart of cians who travelled to Jamaica to ston figures at the beginning of sincere – a chronicle of a trip taken time. As some of the video foot- tones stretched to the limits of all the more when, with mesmer- Tubby. the Congos counts as one of the Icon Give Thank make music different to their own. Icon Eye, an equally striking trav- with eyes, ears, and minds open age shows, the members of The recognition. All of it is strangely ising patience, each takes up his classics of the genre. Released in FRKWYS Vol. 9: Sun Araw & M Geddes Sun Araw, in particular, has made elogue movie made to document wide. Congos – now well into their 60s funky, in a roughed-up and ram- own command to “sing my favour- 1977, the album was produced by Gengras meet The Congos a lot: since his earliest overtures in the otherwise expressly musical At one point in the movie, Sun – weren’t quite sure how to sync shackle way, and summons a sur- ite song”. It’s after that that they Prince Far I Lee “Scratch” Perry at Black Ark, a RVNG Intl 2007, he has released a slew of al- project. (A DVD comes packaged Araw talks about reconciling the up with a pair of young American real sort of prismatic beauty. start intoning a message worth recording studio so mythologised Dh62 bums and singles on CD, vinyl and with the album, both produced as prospects of paradise so prevalent cohorts at the start. Inside their The Congos, meanwhile, sing never forgetting: “music can take Cry Tuff Dub Encounter in reggae lore that the sessions tape – whatever media might prove part of the enterprising New York- in Jamaica with the conflicting studio compound, they tried to and chant, with a devotion to us all around the world”. Chapter 3 (Pressure Sounds) there might as well as have taken amendable to his streams and run collaborative album series realities of poverty and crime no find their way into songs more the kind of high harmonies that The passion with which they place centuries ago. The mixing More than three decades later, slurrings of skewed neo-psychede- FRKWYS.) less rampant there. “It’s that flip shambling and electronically stoked their legend from the start. sing it makes it disarmingly true, Known appropriately as the board at Black Ark, it has been the music on Heart of the Congos lia. The film is a worthwhile work between outer and inner space processed than they were used to. In Sunshine, the mix of voices that and the new context in which they “Voice of Thunder”, Prince Far claimed, boasted a distinctive continues to sound somehow All of that established Sun Araw in its own right. Shot and edited that’s so difficult for people to The governing sound was less tra- make up the group sing a hymn have made themselves at home I delivered booming, guttural sound because of all of the mari- both old and new. In certain ways, as a formidable figure in the US by the New York filmmaker Tony make,” he says. “It’s like the King- ditional roots reggae than a form to the glories of a day awash in attests to ways that “the world” vocal chants made ever- juana smoke blown into its con- it’s the archetypal reggae record, indie underground, which hap- Lowe, it plays as a largely wordless dom of Heaven is here and you of futuristic psychedelia imagined golden light. In Jungle, one of the can change with exploratory deeper in dub collaboration trols. True or not, the music con- marked by the soulful singsong pened to be swelling all around visual diary of a trip filled with a see it – it’s a decision.” At another by two young Californians raised voices gets lowdown and guttural shifts in time, place and states of with artists in the UK ceived there came out sounding cadences and loping low-end him in Los Angeles, home as well genuine sense of searching for all point, he speaks of the music that in an era with no real allegiance to in a way the mimics the lions cen- mind. including Adrian Sherwood, magisterial – not least the songs rhythms that have attended the to the enterprising record label involved. Lowe’s camera zooms would come together in the form of any genre or style. tral to Rastafarian iconography, David Toop and Ari Up from of The Congos, which stirred with genre since its origination in Ja- Not Not Fun and creative cur- in on scores of impressionistic Icon Give Thank. “This was never a All of that makes for a special while another chants a series of Andy Battaglia is a New York- a unique depth of feeling and an maica in the late 1960s. In other rents swirling in from a revitalised scenes, some of them musical and record that I would have made,” he kind of magic when the parts chirping notes in a falsetto upper based writer whose work appears The Slits. even more unique adeptness with ways, however, Heart of the Congos southern California art scene. many others not, which are art- says. “It’s a record that emanated coalesce. The backing tracks by register. in The Wall Street Journal, The heavenly vocal harmonising. sounds like nothing so much as it- So it is that Sun Araw (real name: fully assembled and presented in from a situation I was in.” Sun Araw and M Geddes Gangras In Happy Song, a bellowing elec- Wire, Bookforum and more..