vocals & percussion & a podcast & a pair of projects

Buke and Gase share a playlist, podchats, and two new records made with So Percussion & Rahrah Gabor

• # of Tracks: 69

• Length: 4 hours

• Themes: percussion & voice ~ irregular time signatures ~ electronically modified beats & voices ~ the process of improvisation vs. the process of composition and how recordings can flatten the difference

• Link: spoti.fi (Spotify) — apple.co/3wnsmL9 (Apple Music)

Can percussion-led music hold emotion? Or is the key to interlocking rhythms merely math? I think the answer is obvious.¹ But this is a playlist that puts those questions to the test.

If you’ve been following my mixtape delivery service AHB’s Goodies for awhile now, think of this as a more aggressive adjunct to the bar band from Star Wars playlist that went out in late March. Where the mood of that collection of recordings was floating and ambient — this new one hits harder. It even gets a bit profane at times — lyrically, sonically, how it makes your body move. Where the earlier playlist was entirely crafted from my own aesthetic perspective, this one was selected, refracted and curated primarily through the viewpoint of Buke and Gase — both in terms of individual track selections, and the overall vibe. It is built around a pair of collaborative albums they’ve released on the label I co-founded, Brassland.

If you’ve never heard of Buke and Gase, this episode of the award-winning² radio show and podcast Radiolab is probably a good place to start.³ If you’ve never heard of Rahrah Gabor or So Percussion before, well, read to the end of this email-slash-blog post. But first let’s get to the music…

Spotify version

Apple version

click here —> 

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The playlist includes songs such as…

^ Buke and Gase / Rahrah Gabor: “Taste Up”

^ Bjork: “My Spine” (feat. Evelyn Glennie)

^ Mbongwana Star: “Nganshe”

^ Buke and Gase / So Percussion: “Hold It In”

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Extra Points

The duo known as Buke & Gase⁴ are one of the groups with the longest tenure on the record label I helped start, Brassland. They have posted two collaborative releases to streaming services in 2022—both of which could be summarized as “what happens when percussion is combined with a variety of vocalization techniques.”⁵ On A Record Of — an LP created with the quartet So Percussion — the band’s singer Arone Dyer takes center stage; on the more recent EP-length release (i.e. it’s short!) Arone allows herself to be upstaged by emerging Newark rapper Rahrah Gabor.