The Caliph's Tea Party

VINYL FORMAT. Comes in a silver foil pressed jacket; includes a digital download coupon! It's a tricky thing, re-working a completely unique and peerless piece of music. It is made even trickier when the personality behind the original music is so vivid and otherworldly that it is almost sure to continue to cast its long shadow over whatever new form is chosen for it. It didn't hurt that Gonja had made fans out of quite a few incredibly talented artists. So, The Caliph's Tea Party was slowly summoned to life. Like the Caliphs of the Ummahs of the seventh century, orchestrating affairs from their palaces, Gonjasufi has assembled a collection of artists in his musical world and invited them to exchange ideas. In this spirit, the symbolic and musical centerpiece of the album, as well as its namesake, is the result of the mutual admiration formed between Gonjasufi and Broadcast and The Focus Group. A bewitching, drastic re-working of "DedNd," it takes the form of a suite of layered compositions and radiophonic transmissions. Elsewhere, reinterpretations from new talents shine while established artists continue to surprise. Mark Pritchard (Harmonic313, Africa Hitech) channels Ennio Morricone with epic orchestral dystopia on his remix of "Ancestors," while retaining the inherent gravity of Flying Lotus' original production. Young guns Shlomo and Jeremiah Jae eschew their labeling as "beatmakers" and tap into a fractured emotional core within "Change" and "Holidays," respectively, giving them new leases on life as subtly mechanized melancholia. Bibio smooths out the rough edges of "Candylane" for a remix indebted to the 1980's R&B leftfield, while Brooklyn's Bear in Heaven and Oneohtrix Point Never deal in heavy motorik meditations and ethereal musique concrete.