Venture into the outer reaches of jazz-punk, skronk, and harmolodic funk, and sooner or later you’ll run into Melvin Gibbs. The Brooklyn lifer was the original bassist of the nervy NYC band Defunkt in the early 1980s, part of a potent amalgamation of punk, hip-hop, no wave, and downtown art music bubbling up in the city at the time. Since then, he’s been in bands with Vernon Reid, John Zorn, Bill Frisell, Sonny Sharrock and Henry Rollins; Arto Lindsay considers him his closest collaborator. More recently, 2022’s Anamibia Sessions 1: The Wave was one of the last albums that Peter Rehberg shepherded to publication on Editions Mego before the label founder’s passing in 2021. Released when Gibbs was 64, that album was yet another surprise in a career full of them: abstract low-end rumblings somewhere between Thomas Köner’s 1990s gong experiments and Sunn O))) at their most subterranean.
Amasia: Anamibia Sessions 2 comes out on Hausu Mountain, and it’s so unlike its predecessor that it could be its inverse. If The Wave sucked everything around it into a void of bass, Amasia explodes outward in ribbons of confetti and spangles of bright color. The guiding light is 1970s Miles Davis, and three songs feature Pete Cosey, guitarist on many of Davis’ greatest electric recordings and one of the best Hendrix-influenced guitarists ever (he died in 2012, but some of these recordings date from as far back as 2006). Yet with its distinctly digital sheen, Amasia sounds less like a gatefold head trip than a CD-era approximation of the form—Bill Laswell’s all-star P-Funk smorgasbord Funkcronomicon, for instance, or Akira Sakata’s Cosey-starring sea-shanty freakout fishermans.com.
