Perhaps taking a leaf from Johnny Marr’s Fever Dream playbook, the Paris-born, Chicago-based drummer and producer Makaya McCraven released a double-album called Off The Record in early October: on the last day of the month, its four constituent pieces are being made available separately. Whether ingested in individual helpings or as one big blow-out, this food for the mind comes with one predominant flavour: it’s music that seeks to prove that there is hope for humanity despite the best efforts of digital ‘disruptors’.
Moreso than with Marr’s more holistic 2021–22 collection, there are strong reasons to consider these four EPs as standalone titles. Each represents a separate project made by different musical teams in different places and during different timeframes, so each, unsurprisingly, covers different sonic terrain. But there are two particularly strong links that ensure they make sense when brought together. One is practical and creative, the other thematic and conceptual.
The element that unifies the four EPs musically and compositionally is the method McCraven has made his metier at least as far back as his In The Moment album ten years ago. Each of the four EPs takes live performances by different McCraven-led line-ups as their basis, with the producer then chopping, splicing, augmenting, editing and generally overhauling and reshaping them into finished pieces in his home studio. And for all their compositional and audible dissimilarities, each group of tracks represents a strident argument for the place of the human and the instinctive even amid finished pieces which, at first exposure, may read as more electronic than organic. This would be important at any point in time, but feels ever more urgent in our present era, where it is not just those who self-identify as ‘creative’ who sometimes struggle to see what part the individual will be allowed to play as faceless corporations tout technological solutions for things that rarely seem to properly qualify as problems in the first place.
McCraven constructs his human-machine interface out of defiantly analogue raw materials. Techno Logic throbs around the pulse beat provided by Theon Cross’s firebreathing tuba, recorded during performances that took place eight years and a continent apart. Guitar from Tortoise’s Jeff Parker and sax played by SML’s Josh Johnson provide the blood coursing through Hidden Out!’s veins. Vibraphonists Justefan (on PopUp Shop) and Joel Ross (on The People’s Mixtape) blend ethereality with a nagging urgency enhanced by McCraven’s compositional use of loops, layers and repetition.
Throughout each EP there’s audible glimpses of the rooms the live performances took place in: shouts and applause being the obvious ones, the sense of space and warmth more felt than heard. This feels like a nod to how The Bomb Squad took the crowd noise from the Wattstax LPs to make Nation of Millions sound like a live album. And while there’s no strident political raps here – just a brief explanation of what’s about to go down shouted to the Los Angeles crowd at the 2015 gigs that gave McCraven the ingredients of PopUp Shop, and a few exhortations to feel in the final minute of Techno Logic’s second track, ‘Technology’ – the overarching intent, and the end results, seem cut from similarly revolutionary cloth.
There is something afoot here; signs that the powerful but oft-overlooked human need for connection and community is beginning to cause folk to rouse themselves, that a growing mass of people are sick of having their interaction with art mapped out and restricted by automated recommendation engines and culture-blind code. And it’s no surprise to find this happening in the improvised-music world. Whether it’s Steam Down keyboardist Lorenz Okello-Osengor pausing during his London show in September to argue passionately for the need for artists and audiences to allow themselves to live in the live-music moment, or McCraven and his numerous associates finding ways to foreground the human, the real and the art in a world being determined or devoured by algorithms, the fightback has begun. It’s time to take sides.
