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MH-216 Andre Afram Asmar - Racetothebottom  Andre Afram Asmar has crafted a masterwork of organic dub-influenced downtempo with over twenty guest artists and vocalists including Scientist, Elias, and Israel, from countries in the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, and the Caribbean. Over a year in the making, racetothebottom is an ambitious project that uses live instruments as the base for each track, and then accentuates them with samples, electronics, and computer manipulation. Rooted in non-violence, the search for common ground, and support for the world's oppressed, racetothebottom is meant to be a soundtrack to life. Asmar combines seemingly disparate styles in a single track - Middle Eastern vocals over Jamaican dub, Brazilian rhythms over Western electronics - to accentuate the harmony created, and to focus on beauty found in cultures so often viewed in a negative light. |
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| Reviews Summary |
| Fans of eclectic, globe-spanning sonics will find much to enjoy in the thirteen soothing cuts. - Urb / At the forefront of both hybrid and political music - YRB / Sonically radical - XLR8R / It's not globe-hopping; it's a meltdown. - New York Times / An act worthy of a Nobel Prize. - Signal to Noise |
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| This disc finds underground hip-hop hotbed Mush deviating into radical multicultural inventiveness. On his second album, LA producer Andre Afram Asmar unearths dub's roots and then fertilizes them with exotic seeds from Africa, the Middle East and Crooklyn. Asmar consistently keeps things eerie and disorienting, but he retains a soulful humanity amid the studio sorcery. racetothebottom is as sonically radical as mystical iconoclasts Muslimgauze and Badawi, but with a more uplifting spirit than either. Arabic-dub juggernauts like "camelclutch" and "traptivity" are potently psychedelic antidotes to the dull worthiness of most world-music-inflected fusion. - XLR8R |
