Mala continues to rack up press with his new Cuban Bass stylings. This time XLR8Rs Vivian Host digs in deep for the full analysis…
Words: Vivian Host Photo: Teddy Fitzhugh
Cuban music plays heavily with percussion and goes mental for melodies, but rarely does it meditate on bass weight. By contrast, British producer Mala (of Digital Mystikz/Deep Medi fame) has spent nearly his entire career experimenting with the way bass, sub-bass, and drums can work together to 
rattle minds and stoke dancefloor fires. On Mala in Cuba—a collaboration between DMZ’s proud lion and traditional Cuban musicians—live instrumentation is incorporated within a loose dubstep framework, but Mala keeps a firm hold on the reins. Rather than trying to match the lively, uptempo energy of the Cuban sounds, he envelopes Latin elements in a thick London fog, pulling melancholy from beneath tinkling ivories and adding mystery to reverbed salsa rhythms.
Though Mala went to Cuba to make the record—at the urging of Brownswood label head Gilles Peterson (and as part of his ongoing Havana Cultura initiative)—he didn’t do much writing or arranging there. Rather, he played skeletons of 140 bpm beats to musicians, including Robert Fonseca and his band, singer Danay Suarez, and percussionist Changuito. The players freestyled over the beats, with Mala and an engineer capturing every nuance via tape into a top-of-the-line SSL mixing desk. “I came home from Cuba with about 60 gigs worth of live playing,” he recalls. “It was just so much information to process and to go through. The level of musicianship was phenomenal—so good, it made me feel very uncomfortable and inferior. I don’t understand music in that way. Ask me to hum a C or a D and I can’t do it… but I will hear a C and a D and feel it. I just had to make music how I feel it and this is how it came out. I can only bring what I do, so I guess the record is really me trying to translate my experience of Cuba.”…
Also check out what The Fader had to say.
Tags: Dubstep, Global Bass, Post Dubstep, Tropical Bass