Icon Give Thank is hands down the most important collaboration of the year. The document of a unique, self-sustaining social and musical biotope, an acknowledgement of artistic debt and a thoroughly contemporary, avant-garde work of art.
[Release page] The Congos are a beloved, Jamaican harmony quartet, whose 1977 debut Heart of the Congos, recorded with Lee ”Scratch” Perry at his Black Ark Studio in Kingston, is the stuff of legend. Prolific twenty-first century underground artists Sun Araw (Cameron Stallones) and M. Geddes Gengras, whose own releases have the dub sense of the possibilities of space and the Rastafarian sense of a pantheistic, shared world soul, traveled from Los Angeles to the Congos studio compound in semi-rural St. Catherine with only some basic musical themes and ideas on their laptops.
The miraculous falsetto of Cedric Myton is the sun up in the heavens and volcanic baritone of Watty Burnett the quaking earth below. The humid, smoky air between is charged with magic as Araw and Geddes bounce nyabinghi drumming off video-game trumpets and ground-shaking harmonies off throaty, wending guitar, make celestial pianos tinkle and sitars shimmer. The quartet conveys the earthliest of truths, rights and pleasures—”Food, Clothing and Shelter,” “Sunshine,” “Jungle”—and gives “Thanks and Praise” while the American duo strew pixie dust and weave iridescent, electronic ribbons into the sacred song of the greybeards. There are no highlights, just a seven-sectioned, forty-three minute intensely burning epiphany.
The accompanying feature-length, impressionistic documentary of the ten-day encounter extends the experimental dub aesthetic into the visual realm. Icon Eye is far more than just a ”bonus” DVD. Co-directed by Sam Fleischner, whose first visit to the island resulted in the highly-praised indie feature Wah Do Dem, it is the visual Siamese twin of the aural mosaic created by Araw, Gengras and the Congos on Icon Give Thank, colourful and wobbly as a lithographed tinplate toy robot made in Japan.
The album is the ninth in a series called FRKWYS curated by the label, “pairing contemporary artists with those that may have preceded them in style and/or approach.” Heart of the Congos is widely considered the greatest reggae vocal album ever and the most thoroughly accomplished ”Scratch” Perry production, and Icon Give Thank is hands down the most important collaboration of the year. The document of a unique, self-sustaining social and musical biotope, an acknowledgement of artistic debt and a thoroughly contemporary, avant-garde work of art.
Icon Give Thank & Icon Eye is available on Rvng Intl. [Release page]
