Penny Downbeat | Electronica | Leftfield 4 Items

Tropicantesimo is an extended musical ritual which takes shape through the celebration of sound and dance. Originally born as a regular party at the Fanfulla club in Rome, Tropicantesimo gradually transformed into a collective listening experience which eventually found place at Pescheria the group's official home and studio. Slowly the collective animated by djs Hugo Sanchez, Lola Kola, Rocco Mago, Gabor and Egeeno, began to open up to impromptu jams and collaborations with musicians and djs of various backgrounds. The rhythms are incessant, the BPM is slow and hypnotic. Voices flow between songs, messages and pure sound. The music is kneaded organically to release energy. All this can be found through the extensive production work based on tons of recordings collected over the years. Tropicantesimo Session 3 is the third in a series of three EPs that anticipate the release of the album "Gitania". Like in the previous two chapters here you have three songs recorded and mixed at Pescheria.

Tropicantesimo is a music ritual extended over time and a celebration of sound and dance. It all started 10 years ago at the Fanfulla club in Rome. Nothing more than a party that over the years has transformed into a collective listening experience out of time and space. Meanwhile the collective animated by DJ Hugo Sanchez, Lola Kola, Rocco Bartucci, Gabor and Egeeno moved to a new club called Pescheria, and opened up to spontaneous live jams and collaborations with musicians and DJs from various backgrounds. Rhythms are incessant while the BPM is slow and hypnotic. Voices flow between songs, messages and pure sound, while music is an organism which produces energy. The fruit of all this lives through extensive production work based on recordings collected over the years. "Tropicantesimo Session 1" is the first of a series of three EPs presented as anticipations of the Tropicantesimo Gitania album release. This first EP contains three songs recorded and mixed at Pescheria, laboratory and home of Tropicantesimo. "Don’t Bla Bla Bla" is an anathema and an explicit manifesto about the need for uncompromised sounds and joy in life. When the music kick in, the usual blah blah blah becomes disturbance, as Lola Kola and Egeeno clearly sing. This is a spontaneous live session, an usual practice that generates the Tropicantesimo sound flow. "Samba e Amore" is a cover of a Chico Buarque and Ennio Morricone's song, written in the late 1960s during Buarque exile in Rome. Here the song has been processed by the Tropicantesimo sound machine with Gabor and Lola Kola claiming for freedom and self-determination in life. "Samba and Love" belongs to the Tropicalist music classic repertoire, a great inspiration for the Tropicantesimo sound and vision. "Luna Jamming" is the result of another kind of experiment. Here the DJ culture is hybridized with the improvised live performance, a meeting that can generate unpredictable encounters. Lola Kola and Egeeno bring Loredana Bertè and Bob Marley together for an unprecedented classic Reggae duet on a contemporary techno dub beat. Needless to add that such a combination of elements generates new visions and reaffirms important values such as sharing and getting together.

“Ghost Producer” aka Badawi (aka Raz Mesinai aka Bilal ibn Yakub al-Badawi) is a prolific producer and artist whom has been on the forefront of underground experimental jazz and electronic music scenes around the world for over thirty years, with a massive catalog of genre defying albums on such legendary labels as Roir, Asphodel and Tzadik under various monikers dating back to the late 1980’s. Ghost Producer released his first albums starting in the late 80’s under the monikers “Psy Co.” and “Ruff Riddim Productions”, selling his cassette tapes in NYC, he produced, on average, at least one album per week since 1988 till present day. One of the twenty or so monikers was “Badawi”, later being signed to Roir Records and releasing the seminal experimental dub, punk albums “Bedouin Sound Clash” and later “The Heretic of Ether” on Asphodel. Spending time as a child between Occupied Jerusalem, the West Bank (Balata) and New York City (Rock Steady Park) during the height of the B-Boy era in the 70s and 80s informed Ghost Producer’s singular sound of heavy driving Sufi rhythms, sonic experiments, percussion, piano playing and sound design which has connected him to a wide variety of artists ranging from Maryanne Amacher to John Zorn, to added elements of darkness to music by such artists as Hanz Zimmer (Black Hawk Down) and rappers Danny Brown (Pneumonia) and Skepta and Double D (Don) among many others. At age 14, Ghost Producer was discovered by visionary jazz and rock musician, Juma Sultan (Jimi Hendrix) whom later trusted Ghost Producer with producing the archive of over 2000 hours from recordings from “Studio We” and the Free Jazz Loft Movement in NYC in the 60s and 70s. As a composer, he has worked with Kronos Quartet and has had premiers at Carnegie Hall (Cross Fader, The Echo of Decay) and Lincoln Center (String Quartet For Four Turntables). In addition, Ghost Producer has released several albums on John Zorn’s Tzadik label, where he explored producing to the books of Franz Kafka (Before The Law, Resurrections for Goat Skin, Cyborg Acoustics) As a composer for film, he coined the term “score design” to describe his work in conceiving and producing scores for films with particularly demanding needs, working on such films as A Late Quartet (director Yaron Zilberman composer: Angelo Badalamenti), The Fountain, Black Swan and The Wrestler (Darren Aronofsky/Clint Mansel), Black Hawk Down (Ridley Scott/Hans Zimmer) and many more. In 2014, he was awarded as a fellow in the Sundance Composers Lab. In 2015, Ghost Producer formed the “Underground Producers Alliance”, a unique program for developing producers, performers and composers, with co-founders Scotty Hard (Wu Tang Clan, Medeski Martin and Wood, De La Soul), HPrizm aka High Priest (Anti Pop Consortium), Honeychild Coleman (the 1865, The Slits) and Prince Paul (Jungle Brothers, De La Soul), where Ghost Producer produces entire albums with student participation in his master course on production “The Ghost Program”. This album, The Book of Jinn, is one of many productions done within the course, featuring players/mentors Juma Sultan (percussion), Chandenie (voice) and Shahzad Ismaily (electric bass), with additional student participation from Adam Culbert and Jonah Sollins (aka Goodnight 1500) on synths and percussion as well, then all remixed and rearranged by Badawi into what you hear here, The Book of Jinn.

Ghost Producer aka Badawi (aka Raz Mesinai aka Bilal ibn Yakub al-Badawi) is a prolific producer and artist who has been on the forefront of underground experimental jazz and electronic music scenes around the world for over thirty years, with a catalog of albums on labels as Roir, Asphodel and Tzadik under various monikers dating back to the late 1980s. This album, is one of many productions done within the course.