Radio Citizen makes music poured straight from the melting pot, with the burner turned up so high that you can't tell the original ingredients apart. It's a genre slurry that treats live instruments and samples equally and makes a smooth amalgam of Latin percussion, funk, dub, Afrobeat, Ethio-jazz, post-bop, modal jazz, rock, soul, bossa nova, hip-hop, trip-hop, film noir and blaxploitation soundtracks, assorted Middle Eastern and South Asian modes, French jerk-beat, library records from the 1970s, and some other stuff I probably forgot to mention. Radio Citizen's mastermind is Berlin musician Niko Schabel, a member of excellent modern funk group Poets of Rhythm and a collaborator with musicians as disparate from each other as militant proto-rappers the Last Poets and Franz Ferdinand's Nik McCarthy.
Schabel is a musician's musician, playing a whole rack of woodwinds, keys, and percussion, and he keeps a loose collective around him to fill in the gaps he can't cover with his own instruments and his sample library. His bass clarinet and Rhodes piano are two of the greatest textural elements in this music and exemplify the schism between rough wildness and cool, dark smoothness that provides the album's central tension. With 16 tracks all doing something different, it's hard to pin Berlin Serengeti down, but the overall feel is something like what you might expect from the soundtrack to the greatest as-yet-unfilmed European cop/heist/spy drama, with scenes set in the Far East.
One of Schabel's many weapons is a vocalist called Bajka, who sings in a few languages (lyrics are about the last thing that matter in music like this anyway). Her voice has a certain jazzy tinge to it, low and crisp, but she also sings with a detachment that puts her squarely in today's world.
A few tracks function as interludes, but most are full songs with imaginative melodies and intricate production. "Density" is one of the best, with a wicked flute arrangement and hyperactive swing beat. It's like Quincy Jones's Walking in Space condensed down to just a couple of minutes and played by students of John Coltrane, Rahsaan Kirk and Pharaoh Sanders, with a drummer informed as much by Amon Tobin as Jack DeJohnette or Max Roach. "The Hop" falls more into the cracks between rock, hip-hop, and funk, riding a thumping beat with distorted Rhodes licks and Bajka's filtered vocal.
Beyond the quality of the compositions, the sound is fantastic-- Schabel knows how to record instruments and EQ his samples. The acoustic bass tone is phenomenal-- you can feel the low notes rolling around in the soundbox before popping out the f-holes. On "Night II" you might as well be sitting on the fingerboard with the player's hands slapping down around you. "Night I" has the bass a little more in the pocket, hitched to a barnstorming Cuban groove with a rimshot tone from Heaven.
The trick, though, is that I can talk about the Cuban groove, the bass sound, the horn arrangements-- those freaking saxes!-- but the reason the music works is that it's never any one thing alone making the song go. The music is details upon details, hung meticulously on memorable songs where jazz can casually wave hello to dub as they pass through a pile of drums together. It leaps dozens of genres in a single bound, digs up all those old sounds I love, fits them together, and erects a temple to pop's melting pot.
