MC at London broken beat epicentre, Co-op and forward thinking chameleonic master syncopation, IG Culture teams up with Japan’s Freedom School imprint on their second release Zen Badizm.
Pan-Africanism, creative collaboration and an unbounded spatial and temporal formation drive this work. The gatefold cover by Gene Pendon (HVW8) evokes the presence of influencers like J Dilla, Sun Ra, Marcus Garvey, and Rosa Parks. Pendon’s distinct aesthetic of freestyle line work, graphic motifs and iconography are magnificent in illustrating the album’s themes. There’s also an impressive array of guests on the album like Dee Alexander, Heidi Vogel, John Robinson, K Banger, Corey Wilkes, Tom Ashe, Sascha Williamson, Ernest ‘Kabeer’ Dawkins, Pino Palladino and Bilal Salaam.
Assemblage and influence unite when you drop the needle and it’s off to Africa, via Japan, West London and Saturn. Musically this album is a triptych comprising of three sessions, Zen I, II and III which individually, and in unison blend tonalities of jazz, hip-hop, house and broken beat.
Zen I opens with ‘Black’ and the statement “You’ve got to know where I’ve been to understand where I’m coming from” setting up the converging conceptual themes of realigning a fractured African diaspora and the intertextuality of music in the neoteric age. ‘Adjusted Perspectives’ is a broken-house stormer and ‘Free’ closes the first Zen with one of the best examples a free jazz and technology collision that I’ve heard in a long while.
Zen II is deeply spiritual, on ‘Separate’ the sound of labels like Strata East and Black Jazz meet the proto-bruk sound reminiscent of the Visions and Archive labels. Encircling the black vinyl Saturn’s rings, ‘Ra Bops in Blacknuss’ disembeds the music from worldly anger and politics for a moment of astral travelling , then flowing into the remake of Eddie Kendricks’ ‘Girl U Need a Change of Mind’ which makes for a beautiful return.
Zen III is a playful affair where elements flow freely between the three tracks, ‘This Love’ and two versions of ‘Consumed’. In this Zen IG parallels sampling as a context building strategy and metaphor for the afro-diasporic experience making it equally lucid as it is ludic.
The vinyl release also includes instrumentals of ‘Black’ and ‘Separate’ and there’s word of a forthcoming remix EP which will include a remix from Georgia Ann Muldrow.
Zen Badizm is an ambitious attempt at cultural redemption on two levels, ethnographic and musical. Simply put, it works.
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