{"title":"Melvin Gibbs","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"anamibia-sessions-1-the-wave","title":"Anamibia Sessions 1: The Wave","description":"\u003cp\u003eMelvin Gibbs is the renowned bass player and producer from Brooklyn who's vast resume includes playing with Sonny Sharrock, John Zorn, The Rollins Band, Dead Prez, Caetano Veloso and Femi Kuti amongst others. A solid resume, no doubt, but what is Gibbs doing on Editions Mego?\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBehind the scenes, those who know Gibbs knew that amongst all this he was also tinkering away at another form of music, one which skirts around the border between music and sound design. The Wave is the first release that reveals this side of Gibbs' creative output to those outside his inner circle.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe driving force for this output is Gibbs' multi-decade friendship with acclaimed American video artist and cinematographer Arthur Jafa. Over the course of time Gibbs and Jafa have had many conversations about music and the connection between film and music. Jafa's desire to make film that worked the way Black (as in Black\/African-American\/ Afro-diasporic peoples) music worked inspired Gibbs to study the filmmakers Serge Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov and incorporate their philosophies and tactics when recording his own music. The two discussed sound design which directly informed Gibbs' choice of music making tools and led to him acquiring Symbolic Systems Kyma software and hardware, incorporating this as a composition tool and sound design and component in his work. These conversations bore concrete fruit through Gibbs' work for TNEG, the film studio Jafa ran with filmmakers Malik Sayeed and Elissa Blount Moorhead. Gibbs created the soundtrack for their very first project, the short film \"Deshotten 1.0\" (2009 - directed by Jafa and Sayeed) as well as their Martin Luther King-inspired meditation on Black life \"Dreams Are Colder Than Death\" (2013, directed by Jafa)\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe bass-forward music, or 'sonics' as Gibbs calls it, emerged from an alternative mode of contemplation, a mode that he sees as closer to the mindset of a rootworker, an African-American herbal doctor who cures psychic ailments using means derived from African spiritual practice, entering a forest to find the right plants for a suffering client than a mediator attempting to invoke mindfulness. Gibbs says this practice yields results that suggest an aural form of creation akin to coagulation, a formal movement that gives the sense that a flow of sounds can emit something bearing resemblance to solidifying objects.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Editions Mego","offers":[{"title":"Black LP","offer_id":50452417741131,"sku":"2003571","price":27.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/cover.ki-1_2d9c9a89_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727151884"},{"product_id":"amasia-anamibia-sessions-2","title":"Amasia: Anamibia Sessions 2","description":"\u003cp\u003eMelvin Gibbs’s \u003cem\u003eAmasia: Anamibia Sessions 2 \u003c\/em\u003efinds him assuming the roles of composer, arranger, collagist, performer, and bandleader — while merging recordings that span decades, featuring an interdisciplinary array of collaborators, into a composite whose amalgam of ideas transcend categorization. \u003cem\u003eAmasia\u003c\/em\u003e shifts the focus from Gibbs’s solo electronic experiments towards the realm of large ensemble assemblage, recontexualizing performances recorded as early as 2006 within the scope of his contemporary production and in-the-studio contributions from collaborators in 2024-2025. The thrilling results find, for example, the inimitable guitarist Pete Cosey who recorded his parts in 2006 ripping distorted leads alongside the organ of experimental jazz keyboard pillar John Medeski (from 2006) over a drum performance by omnivorous luminary Greg Fox (from 2024). Gibbs’s temporally transplanted sessions defy space and time, but his production and editing — in addition to his drum programming, which takes cues from everything from present-day rap production to frenetic strains of contemporary electronic music — coheres the work into an mosaic of voices that testifies to his horizon-seeking vision as a modern composer. In his role as the spearhead of \u003cem\u003eAmasia,\u003c\/em\u003e Melvin Gibbs drew inspiration from Teo Macero and Miles Davis’s production \/ editing on landmark albums including Bitches Brew and On The Corner — with the album Agharta serving as the primary inspiration for the album’s creation. Gibbs began meticulously piecing together \u003cem\u003eAmasia\u003c\/em\u003e to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of Agharta in 2025, an album whose expansive atmospheres and genre-agnostic experiments inform his work to this day.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Hausu Mountain","offers":[{"title":"CD","offer_id":53229307068747,"sku":"R3107-9432","price":15.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"LP - Crystal Clear","offer_id":53275681128779,"sku":"R3107-4447","price":29.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"LP - Black","offer_id":53275682636107,"sku":"R3107-3454","price":27.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/unnamed-2025-08-22T105231.525.jpg?v=1755856359"}],"url":"https:\/\/shop.roughtrade.com\/fr\/collections\/melvin-gibbs.oembed","provider":"Rough Trade","version":"1.0","type":"link"}