The Mixtapers Flowers / Bloom Feat. Georgia Anne Muldrew & Dudley Perkins

180 gram 12“ black vinyl LP with b/w insert and full color jacket. Recorded in three live sessions at the end of April 2014 at Duna Studio in Ravenna, Italy. „I founded The Mixtapers 5 years ago together with my homie Brothermartino, we enjoyed playing hip hop and modern funk live using analogue drum machines, bass, piano, and percussion. The Mixtapers is both a band and a production, it's a duo/trio production which extends into a quartet/quintet live band depending on the kind of album we're recording or live show we are doing. Dudley dug our first EP and suggested to make a jam together with him and Georgia Anne, so we hit the studio and recorded the tracks in four days. They asked us to choose a couple of Georgia or Dudley's tracks so that we could record a live version of them, we chose his track "Flowers" and „Sunset“ (which we eventually kept instrumental). The day before the recording we had a very nice long video skype with Georgia and Dudley where she asked us to record very long tracks, like in a John Coltrane suite, that suggestion inspired the whole band approach to this recording session. We recorded „Flowers“ in one live take (exactly as you can hear it)... in the middle of the song we re-harmonized the original chord progression (so we called that part "Bloom") and Georgia did some amazing choir on that. The whole song was so long we decided to split it into two different songs called „Flowers“ and „Bloom“, so that we could release two short edits and the extended original version.
The G&D album was recorded in quartet using analogue drum machines, bass, piano, keys, percussion, and dub sirens. On „Bloom“ we used a rare and mystical Saharan percussion instrument from Morocco called „Krakebs“ originally used in ancestral „Gnawa“ music. It was a very unusual choice to do on a hip hop track, but it worked and Georgia loved it! This work with G&D is very special to us“ - Michele Manzo