Melvin Gibbs — Anamibia Sessions 1: The Wave

Melvin Gibbs is a stalwart of the downtown scene of the last decades in New York, and one of the most prolific bass players in jazz and experimental circles.  His low-end voice can be heard on works ranging from Sonny Sharrock to more contemporary collaborators like Jeff Parker. So, what is Gibbs up to when he is creating alone, without the usual host of instrumentalists by his side? His magisterial solo album of low-key electronic compositions maps completely uncharted waters for Gibbs, and perhaps for music more generally.

The Wave is inspired by the musicians's close working relationship and friendship with filmmaker and art world star, Arthur Jafa, whose meditations on Black diasporic musical traditions have resulted in a body of work that is the closest visual equivalent to currents in radical Black thought, from Afropessimism to anti-carceral, anti-colonialist argumentation. What unites these theoretical tributaries and the legacy of post-Bitches Brew Miles Davis is the exploration of a landscape beset by absences – of light, of a clear horizon of life – and the inexorable weight of impending death.

Gibbs does not so much refer to these ideas as conjure their consequences for his sonic terrain, using the lowest of subharmonic frequencies to create actual, physical pressure on the ears and body through auditory manipulation. There is an undeniable smoothness to the darkness that Gibbs creates, referring to the language of the Ibo in "Ibo Code", and bracing us for the absorption of light that it portends. It recalls earlier moments of Black thought like W.E.B. Du Bois' Darkwater, which could have served as a fitting title for Gibbs' work, adorned with a still from Jafa's AGHDRA: an undulating wave of dark matter, rippling with the history of enslavement and transit. The opening track, "Future Blues", lays the groundwork for the kinds of double meaning that is at issue. Is it a blues for the future, or an anticipatory blues that is yet to come?

There is no mistaking Gibbs' penchant for the lower frequencies of the sonic spectrum, which rumbles, often at the threshold of the audible, beneath the mix of voices and crackling sonic debris on "Life Force", swallowed in the miasma of the aptly named "Light Absorption". I think one could build an entire course or seminar around Gibbs' work, as a performance of something which is merely linguistic or latent in the annals of discursive theory, which achieves a rare, crystalline presentation as music. Very highly recommended. To find out more