FRKWYS Vol. 9: ICON GIVE THANK

Released

Californians Sun Araw and M Geddes Greengras have spent untold time in Jamaica working with a wide variety of reggae and dancehall artists via their Duppy Gun project but this is probably their most intense collaboration of all. Veteran vocal trio (and Lee “Scratch” Perry muses) The Congos, and the hand percussion of Niyabinghi drummers feel like ancient features of a landscape, but the production is not over-faithful to reggae technique: it’s dub, for sure, but fractured, fragmented, perhaps very true to the jarring cultural interface of the musical hook up. Whatever, it is a truly hallucinatory experience — there are very, very few records that can give you a contact high as potent as this one.

Joe Muggs