Artwork & Words by David D. Robbins Jr.
Album: A Sufi and a Killer • Release Date: Today, March 9, 2010
IN HIS MIND: Gonjasufi is the latest musical invention from Sumach Ecks. He’s a Bikram yoga practitioner, devout Muslim, hip-hop beatsmith, spiritual seeker, and mysterious mystic living somewhere out in the Mojave. Seriously. Gonjasufi has worked with Flying Lotus and Gaslamp Killer before releasing his new Eastern-influenced album, “A Sufi and a Killer” through the apropos Warp Records. It’s hard to describe Gonjasufi’s music. You’ll hear 70s disco funk in tracks like “Candylane”, the dark industrialized tomes of Massive Attack in a song like “Love of Reign” or a Quasimodo’-like strangeness in “Ancestors” — with his idiosyncratic delivery — or maybe you’ll hear a touch of Bad Brains in his song “SuzieQ”. This is a sprawling work that seems to exist without a real precedent. Ecks sings in a whisper, soft falsetto, and choral harmonies. He even sings a sort of folk psychedelia in “Sheep” — before the track deconstructs and rebuilds with extremely inventive transitions into female harmonies, horns, island percussion, sitar — punctuated by the irreverently hilarious line, “If I was a sheep, I’d have to be quick on my feet.” “A Sufi and a Killer” is a stellar stream-of-consciousness poured into 19 songs and one hidden track. The album envelopes like smoke. It surrounds like a desert. One of the most hypnotic tracks on the album “Dust”, is a bit like Chocolate Genius. It starts off with guttural yelps, and Gonjasufi giving us some good advice, “Listen to this …”:
“Where did you find me? / Baby, don’t you undermine me. / You can’t refine me. / You have perfect timing. / You remind me, of someone I’ve met before. / Please underline me … Let’s do a duet. / And let’s do it. / And make it grimy / The way that the truth is to the dotted line.”
VIDEO BELOW: Gonjasufi “Dust”
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His voice, as co-producer Flying Lotus asserts, is ‘timeless, incredible filth.’ It is anger, fury, spit, bile, sweat, suffering, broken, and at the next instant honeyed, spiritual, vulnerable, hopeful and a thousand other things. In Gonjasufi you hear an artist lying bare on the canvas. But there is also playfulness, a manic sonic grin that emanates.