Prayer In Dub

Description

Body Mepa is the New York quartet composed of Greg Fox (drums), Sasha Frere-Jones (guitar), Melvin Gibbs (bass), and Grey McMurray (guitar). As luminaries in the cross traditions of improvised music, rock, jazz, fusion, and contemporary classical music, the four artists have each spent decades building diverse practices that extend beyond sound into multiple disciplines. Prayer in Dub, their second album on Hausu Mountain, follows the group's 2020 album, The Work Is Slow. The album showcases a group whose collective intuition as instrumentalists and songwriters living in the room has deepened with each take they recorded. Prayer in Dub sees Body Mepa undertaking new experiments with the structure and atmosphere of the songs, unfolding into a wide menu of both longer and more concise pieces that suggest deliberate shifts in energy and emotional resonance. The album presents an exciting contrast between storms of precise rhythmic interactions and slowly expanding fields of multi-guitar and bass textures, alternately pushing the narrative toward explosive peaks of intensity and diving into ambient expanses. Contemplative guitar lines, both dry and applied in total abstraction, weave together over rhythm section grooves indebted to dub before shifting the dial toward a beatific twang. Knotted and distorted solos emerge from the fray over networks of arpeggios and drum fills.