Evidence-You (Produced by DJ Premier) (Full Rip)

off of his upcoming Cats & Dogs album

spaceagehustle:

Brian Eno talks Clams Casino on BBC Radio (July 6, 2011) (download)

A couple of days ago Brian Eno was a guest on Radcliffe and Marconi, a daily music show on BBC Radio, and played the instrumental to “Dem Wan”, originally a Clams Casino-produced record from Deezy D.

For those among the younger set, Eno is an artist and producer best known for his work with the Talking Heads and David Bowie, in addition to his ambient solo work, like Another Green World, Here Come The Warm Jets and Ambient 1: Music For Airports.

It’s interesting, though not necessarily surprising, that Eno would engage with “Dem Wan” and it’s washed out, tribal aesthetic. In the late 70s, Eno collaborated with Talking Heads frontman, David Byrne (himself an accomplished American artist), on a record called My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which focused on the percussive elements of funk and “world” music, and featured mostly sample-based “vocals” ranging from San Francisco radio programs to Lebanese mountain singers. The result was a record that would share some of the same musical ideas and techniques that would form the foundation of hip hop (though ultimately shading more “art rock” than anything else).

This isn’t to say you could drop “Dem Wan” into the sequence of My Life… and no one would notice. Quite the contrary in fact, given that My Life… was recorded entirely with analog equipment, so 808s* really weren’t an option. Yet, even if the sound of Clams is far removed from Byrne and Eno, the artistic approach of folding in international music (Jamaican in Clams’ case, Middle Eastern, Egyptian and many others with Byrne and Eno) to a sound with its roots in the United States (hip hop and funk) is clearly shared.

It’s also fucking exciting that the guy being shouted out on BBC Radio by influential musicians is the guy making beats on a laptop in his mother’s attic, and not the guy dropping stacks to have his album cover plastered all over the backgrounds of whatever rap blogs get the most pageviews.

Update:  Here is the full segment from Eno’s appearance last week, courtesy of literalshit.

-SM

*Roland’s TR-808 was actually released in early 1980, so theoretically could have been a part of My Life…, but the record was finished by October 1980, so it’s unlikely the artists involved were aware of it’s existence.