When you recontextualize other people's music, it's not enough that your sources fit a certain aesthetic sweet spot-- you have to do something transformative enough with those sources that it brings out new aspects in both their music and your own. The best producers and beat collectives could do this seemingly at will, get listeners simultaneously considering the inner musical workings of both the Bomb Squad and James Brown, RZA and Willie Mitchell, Basement Jaxx and Gary Numan. Like his older brother Madlib, Oh No seems as fascinated with the notion of picking a specific palette to work from as he is with advancing his own style, having previously done so with albums based on thematic source material like stage-and-screen composer Galt MacDermot (Exodus into Unheard Rhythms) and Middle Eastern/Mediterranean psychedelic rock (Dr. No's Oxperiment). But if Oh No's style isn't drastically different than that of his famously out-there brother, it's still a recognizably consistent and characteristic one, no matter what he feeds into his sampler.
Dr. No's Ethiopium is the next in his string of dedicated-source concept records, and it's the kind of thing you'd think would have been done a long time ago. Drawing off Ethiopian music of the 1960s and 70s, especially since the Ethiopiques series rose to prominence, would fit the more adventurous styles of hip-hop production to a T, and the region's recognizable but culturally unique permutations of American jazz, funk, and folk music traditions (and the precursors thereof) would make for some accessibly exotic beats. That it was Oh No who came around to it is fortunate; the man has professed to be the kind of producer who's always willing to find a way to make beats out of anything, and his track record's revealed that M.O. to work out well for him. (He did have two of the best beats on The Ecstatic, in any case.)
Ethiopium-- a top-notch genre name if there ever was one-- rests on the ability of Oh No's alchemy to preserve just enough of the original sound to make its origins recognizable, but still finds a way to whittle it down to shards and fit it to his own, differently-angled approach. The songs themselves are shreds of music in themselves, 36 tracks at two minutes or less, in the now-familiar structure of typical Stones Throw beat-tape concoctions. They're odd little see-sawing loops and stagger-step blasts assembled from thickly-stitched scraps of brass sections and chiming guitars and wailing vocals, all truncated into little bursts of disembodied, attention-grabbing remnants. Sometimes the rhythms feel built around the loops, like the sharply plucked notes (possibly from a lyre-style krar) that choppily bob along with "Madness"' bounce. Other times, he lets the original rhythms play out for a bit like he does at the beginning of "Problematic", only to yank the rug out from under it and mold it into a new, more boom-bap-friendly cadence. And there are tracks where he just uses these loops and snippets like almost diversionary flourishes, garnishing tracks like "Drive By" and "Midnight Missions" with scattered Ethiopian ambiance.
Not every sound on this album comes from Oh No's cratedigging trips through the East African reaches of Egon's record collection. There's lots of modern digital boom-clap beats, and I suspect that many of the drum breaks come as much from the go-to hip hop repertoire of vintage American funk and jazz loops as they do from a potential Addis Ababa equivalent to Clyde Stubblefield. Which is part of the appeal, really; some of the brightest moments come from the tracks where crackly shreds of Ethiopian source material push exclamatory notes through a wall of post-Dilla bass-glow rhythm ("Louder"; "Strong"). And while Ethiopium has a few moments where Oh No teeters on the edge of irreverence-- some goofy non sequitur, expletive-filled movie soundbites, a few blasts of brass or vocals that seem picked as much for their foreign strangeness as their beauty-- it also lets the loop-Benihana structure recede every so often to just let the original texture of the sources shine through, like it does on the gorgeous "The Pain". Oh No knows just what he's got to work with on this album, and in finding every angle he can for an incredible array of source material, he's made that much more of a case for his own style, too.
