If nothing else, Greek producer Larry Gus' Silent Congas can serve as an index of where sample-based music is at the beginning of the 21st century: repetitive, simply structured grooves that draw a little on disco, a little on soul, a little on hip-hop, a little on psychedelia, and a little from that ever-expanding territory of outré/foreign-language/exploitation-film obscurities on which tiny reissue labels across the world stake their humble claim. Music built from other music that doesn't so much envision a new world as recreates an old one that only feels, distantly, like it ever existed to begin with.
Silent Congas could be compared to-- or mistaken for-- the work of several other artists. Both here and on 2009's Stitches, Gus does his European takes on J Dilla ("Hutting") and Madlib ("Circular Obsidian"). On "Contours Sway", he is not only the Avalanches in general, but "Since I Left You" specifically. Nobody will hear Silent Congas and think, there's that Larry Gus sound! because there isn't a Larry Gus sound.
The music Gus makes is in a sense predicated on anonymity. But when making music from other music, the bar for some sense of authorship is set even higher. He has to make his samples have to say something with him that they couldn't say without him. Here, they seem to say things like "whoa" repeatedly-- not a bad message per se, but one that can benefit from complication. Ironically, when Gus sings, he mumbles.
Congas feels like an album that doesn't hit a high mark in part because it seems to have aimed low in the first place. The mystical, jazzy aspects of it allude to a depth that the songs' brief runtimes and basic structures don't make room for-- "Circular Obsidian", for example, feels like a two-minute preview for a version of itself that could be 10 times as long. Music like this is essentially a kind of audio collage, and, like collage, Silent Congas has huge potential for strange and revealing juxtapositions between different kinds of sounds, although it winds up being a friendly place for lots of compatible sounds to mingle rather than anything profound.
