One of this year's nicest surprises was an album called Icon Give Thank, which put roots-reggae vocal group the Congos together with experimental musicians M. Geddes Gengras and Cameron Stallones, aka Sun Araw. The Congos are responsible for one of the most venerated albums in reggae history (1977's Heart of the Congos); Stallones is a guy from Long Beach who records gooey half-songs and peppers his interviews with reflections like "life's a trip, but it's heavy, too," and "you have to just learn to continually create the situation inside yourself."
The pairing-- part of RVNG Intl.'s FRKWYS series-- seemed wacky but ultimately highlighted more similarities than differences. Sun Araw tracks usually consist of a few basic things: slow, bubbling drum machine patterns, strobing synthesizers, and guitars processed to sound like the trickle and buzz of a jungle at night, or a Rube Goldberg machine burping up its springs. Occasionally, Stallones is inspired to sing, and when he is, he tends to keep it simple. (Most of his lyrics sound like variations on "alright!," "yeah!," or "alright, yeah!")
The connection to reggae isn't in the tracks' composition, but in their texture and vibe. Like a lot of prime 70s Jamaican music, Sun Araw albums function like a sonic sweat lodge: hot, trippy, and claustrophobic, but joyful at their core, a collection of a thousand sounds bumping into each other in a humid room.
His last two albums, On Patrol and Ancient Romans, could be as dense as Pink Floyd and 70s Miles Davis-- two good musical approximations of pitch blackness. His newest album, The Inner Treaty, focuses on a lighter, more scattered side of his sound, a sound rooted in gospel and the positive, mystical explorations of jazz artists like Pharoah Sanders and Alice Coltrane.
Of course, this is still Sun Araw, and the end result still basically sounds like a neon compost heap. The difference between The Inner Treaty and On Patrol or Ancient Romans is scale: This time around, the heap seems a lot smaller. The mix isn't as cloudy either. Instead of letting everything melt together-- "melt" being the most important verb in the Sun Araw dictionary-- Stallones keeps all the sounds pretty well delineated. The sounds themselves are more cartoonish, too: the squiggles squigglier and the farts farther. The result is an album both more contained and more chaotic-- the sound of something icky growing in a petri dish.
One interesting thing about Stallones' music in a broader sense is how much more it relies on black and nonwestern sounds than on white, European ones. Stallones isn't the only young white artist who could be named here, of course-- the slow rebranding of R&B as something hip and artistically credible is part of the conversation, too. Fifteen years ago, "experimental" and "noise" music was descended primarily from classical composition, synth labs, or largely male populations figuring out how to make weird, harsh-ass sounds on shoestring budgets. Now reggae and dub are familiar touchstones for twentysomething bands on cassette labels, and you get art-world-approved musicians like Oneohtrix Point Never naming DJ Screw as an influence-- evidence that the terms on which music being made by groups like Stallones' are changing.
Stallones' particular gift is creating a space where things are always either barely coming together or almost falling apart-- a space where music can sound like it's coming to life on record. My understanding, though, is that most of what Stallones does is improvisational, and my guess is that committing any of what he does to record is just playing the game of how music is traditionally released into the world-- as physical product. In that respect, The Inner Treaty-- like all Stallones' albums-- is less a jewel box of finely honed compositions and more a rough sketch of how Stallones is currently thinking about how music might be put together. On Patrol and Ancient Romans were foggy and inward-spiraling albums; The Inner Treaty is clear, toylike, and sometimes even funny.
His closest relation in recent history is Excepter, a Brooklyn band whose single greatest talent as musicians was being able to sound like they'd unlearned how to play music entirely. And like Excepter, Stallones seems more concerned with producing a lot of material than perfecting any of it. That's no slight. Part of what's exciting about an artist like Stallones is that you know he's already on to the next thing. Icon Give Thank, the Congos collaboration, came out in April. Two imaginative, weird, genre-pushing records in one year-- not bad.
