Amasia: Anamibia Sessions 2

Venture into the outer reaches of jazz-punk, skronk, and harmolodic funk, and sooner or later you’ll run into Melvin Gibbs. The Brooklyn lifer was the original bassist of the nervy NYC band Defunkt in the early 1980s, part of a potent amalgamation of punk, hip-hop, no wave, and downtown art music bubbling up in the city at the time. Since then, he’s been in bands with Vernon Reid, John Zorn, Bill Frisell, Sonny Sharrock and Henry Rollins; Arto Lindsay considers him his closest collaborator. More recently, 2022’s Anamibia Sessions 1: The Wave was one of the last albums that Peter Rehberg shepherded to publication on Editions Mego before the label founder’s passing in 2021. Released when Gibbs was 64, that album was yet another surprise in a career full of them: abstract low-end rumblings somewhere between Thomas Köner’s 1990s gong experiments and Sunn O))) at their most subterranean.

Amasia: Anamibia Sessions 2 comes out on Hausu Mountain, and it’s so unlike its predecessor that it could be its inverse. If The Wave sucked everything around it into a void of bass, Amasia explodes outward in ribbons of confetti and spangles of bright color. The guiding light is 1970s Miles Davis, and three songs feature Pete Cosey, guitarist on many of Davis’ greatest electric recordings and one of the best Hendrix-influenced guitarists ever (he died in 2012, but some of these recordings date from as far back as 2006). Yet with its distinctly digital sheen, Amasia sounds less like a gatefold head trip than a CD-era approximation of the form—Bill Laswell’s all-star P-Funk smorgasbord Funkcronomicon, for instance, or Akira Sakata’s Cosey-starring sea-shanty freakout fishermans.com.

It’s easy to think of ’70s Miles as an impassable vanguard in exploratory electrified music, but he was still catering to popular tastes, bending templates from Sly Stone and James Brown into brave new shapes on Jack Johnson and On the Corner. Likewise, Gibbs works with an ear for much of the most exciting electronic music of the last few decades, not least the less dorm room–friendly end of the Brainfeeder catalog (Ras G’s Back on the Planet, pre-anime Thundercat) and the post-vaporwave prog of Hausu Mountain and Orange Milk. There’s even a hint of 2000s radio R&B production in the sawtooth synths and layers of beatboxing from Napoleon Maddox. Amasia sounds like what might happen if Timbaland and his Virginia Beach peers forswore pop and just made whatever their machines told them to.

Though this eclectic list of inputs betrays the considerable span of time in which Gibbs created these six tracks, they hang together across a cohesive 38 minutes, long enough for the players to spread out but short enough to still feel a little jarring when it ends. On “Felonious Monk,” Gibbs leads a group improvisation over a clubby drumbeat that’s constantly transmogrifying, beginning in the spacious territory of Brooklyn drill (which Gibbs experienced, like many other New Yorkers, as the soundtrack to the George Floyd protests in 2020) before picking up the tempo and arriving at something like the low-budget, hyperspeed club music of the late Ghanaian producer DJ Katapila. The Cosey-featuring “Gullah Jack Style,” named for the leader of an American slave revolt in the 1820s, riffs on Curtis Mayfield’s “Pusherman” over a spluttery groove. “The Very First Flower” is a whirlwind of cymbal taps and rose-colored electric piano blooms.

Things get even better from there, with “16 Dimensions of Underwater Light” (co-written with trumpeter Chris Williams) opening a weightless space through which drums swing dangerously like pendulums; it’s something like a distant, waterlogged cousin of Tricky’s “Vent.” The 13-minute, nearly side-long “Luigi Takes a Walk” takes off with help from New York drum god Greg Fox (who plays with Gibbs in Body Meπa), switching halfway through from an ecstatic spiritual jazz patter into a drunken brontosaurus swivel undergirded by some of Gibbs’ thickest, funkiest bass playing on the record. “O.G. Dreams of Lost Love” is an exploded wasteland of evil-sounding woodwinds, through which the individual burrs and kats of Maddox’s beatbox performance wriggle with little lives of their own.

All of it adds up to a triumph for the now 67-year-old Gibbs and his collaborators: a record by a veteran artist made over a long period, informed by currents that came and went during its gestation but which still feels like part of a conversation with a contemporary experimental music landscape that values screen sheen over analog hum. It’s also a triumph for Hausu Mountain, who, let’s not forget, inherited the daunting task of taking up the Anamibia baton from the venerable Editions Mego. If HausMo keeps putting out music this good, it might be time to grant it similar prestige.