Review: Gonjasufi – MU.ZZ.LE
Gonjasufi has a new album out, and, surprising nobody, it is without a doubt the spaciest album to be released so far this year. A yoga teacher hailing from Las Vegas, the ‘sufi’s name is apt: his music is equal parts come-hither mystic and hazy, blissed-out beats. The fringiest part of the already-pretty-far-out Los Angeles “beat music” scene, Gonjasufi (real name: Sumach Valentine) turned heads after his transfixing falsetto appeared on the Flying Lotus track “Testament.” MU.ZZ.LE ventures into a lot of the same dream-trance territory, Valentine’s voice wafting over the hyper-compressed abstract fuzz of looped ‘70s jazz records.
But MU.ZZ.LE isn’t a completely abstract album the way that, say, FlyLo’s Los Angeles or even J Dilla’s Donuts were. Where those albums were really and truly beat music – where repetition, groovy, and subtlety reign – MU.ZZ.LE is an album, of, well, songs, of addition and subtraction and resolution. This difference is evident on charts like the mellow, effervescent “The Blame,” or the album’s crystalline-funk single “Nikels and Dimes,” where ‘sufi’s yogic sense of balance is most clear. My favorite track, however, is the eerie, dragging “Venom,” on which dub percussion and a shady, monophonic synth stutter against Valentine’s slow wail. He’s the Jimi Hendrix to Dilla’s Miles Davis (or FlyLo’s Herbie Hancock).
Gonjasufi - Nikels and Dimes (Music Video)
Gonjasufi - The Blame (taken from new mini-album MU.ZZ.LE)
