Abstract Orchestra & Ghostlife
Madvillain Remixes
Originally released in 2023. Trying to put the enigmatic producer Ghostlife into words is no easy feat, for a start very
few people have ever met him. Best way to describe Ghostlife is Kyser Soze with a keyboard, minus all the criminal bits,
an anonymous tactician with an ear for a woozy beat. He may indeed have been the source of the above tall tales, writer
of his own fiction if you will. It is perhaps then fitting that he should be pulled towards another artist who spent
much of his career sowing the seeds of doubt in regard to his own identity, the much-lamented MF Doom. Respected rapper
Doom not only hid his face from the public but was also well known for releasing music under a raft of different
monikers adding further mystery to a canon of work that had reached a legendary status before his untimely death in
2020, and after. In this instance it is Doom's collaborations with Madlib, resulting in the 2004 ground-breaking album
Madvillainy, that got Ghostlife's remix reflex twitching. He decided to further ramp up the subterfuge (this is dream
within a dream stuff) and remix some choice cuts from Abstract Orchestra's interpretation of the record. For those who
don't know, Abstract Orchestra, led by saxophonist Rob Mitchell, are based on the classic jazz big band instrumentation
of saxes, trumpets and trombones and features the cream of the north's jazz scene. When you dig into Madvillainy you
will note many of the samples (Sun Ra, Bill Evans, and Freddie Hubbard amongst others) lent a jazz-oriented feel to the
record, an ethos that, in turn, lent itself perfectly to the deconstruction and re-imagining by Abstract. Ghostlife
wanted peel back the next layer of this onion and, inspired by Kaytranada's organic synthesis of the hip hop aesthetic
among slightly higher BPMs, Ghostlife began to pick tracks from Abstract's Madvillain 1 and 2 to play around with. This
was all done above board of course. He made contact with Rob who was so intrigued by what Ghostlife sketched out that
handed over the original stems with his blessing. All in all Ghostlife remixed ten tracks, including "Raid," "Fancy
Clown," "Curls," and "Figaro," and has forgone the big arrangements. Rather he has coaxed out hooks, and sampled small
sections, dipping into Abstract Orchestra's work with the steady precision of a watchmaker to create something new and
exciting.
Price
Genre
Format
LP - 1 disk
Release
28-02-2025
Label
Item-nr
1245641
EAN
5050580802421
Availability
Not in stock