Madlib Tunnels Miles Away

It’s hard to keep up with Madlib. The Los Angeles multi-instrumentalist and producer relentlessly breaks headway in the spectrums of hip-hop, jazz, and experimental electronic production. In 2010 he’s releasing an album every month (at the least) on Stones Throw Records, and chances are, they’re all call for many replays. Although in the midst of so many efforts, some of the more brilliant work might just fall beneath the cracks — still, my guess is that Madlib realizes this, knowing that eventually we’ll catch up with his torrential pace, or at least future generations will have to dig through some deep crates. The Guardian writer Paul Morley can help us out in this case. He wrote an excellent depiction of Madlib, the multi-talented performer, the man with many masks, the creator of fractured and spatially transcendent rhythms, the sampler of past sounds to reinvent future possibilities and thereby rework the way we live in the present. The article also has something to do with Madlib’s own post-pop jazz group, where he plays all the roles, The Last Electro-Acoustic Space Jazz & Percussion Ensemble, and its new effort, Miles Away:

Another way of looking at it is that Madlib, this master manipulator of history, ego, sound, electronics and image, this boastful anti-publicist, is the ultimate superstar of a new ghostly, free-forming alternative universe, a dark, crazed underground you can reach into through that tempting Google door, another shape-shifting reality made up of found and remade realities, a hyper-electric zone where you can organise endless presences, and presents, for yourself….

Hidden deep in the turbulent center-less center of all this diverting possibility, cut off from the lively but mundane pop civilization as represented by the award shows, the famous faces and the mainstream indie websites, fragmenting his personality, his relative fame, his musical enthusiasms into more and more randomly interrelated bits, exists Madlib. The racy, shady, mad king of this other, oddly realer, world. The invisible, improvising, abstract superstar, experimenting with time, scattering clues all over the less than secure place, checking out the limits of the imagination, hinting how we might operate in the future, where we will be able to freely select, compile and adjust our multiple identities and the numerous dimensions we inhabit. Now that’s what you want a musician to do: see into the future by listening to the past to remake the present. Even if very few notice at the time.

Miles Away reinvents the forces behind a number of spiritual jazz greats, from John Coltrane to Woody Shaw, with a touch of that home-grown Madlib ferocity.

[Via Stones Throw.]