Mala – Mala In Cuba
Brownswood: 2012
Chances are the word “dubstep” makes you cringe. It makes you crawl into a hole and wish that the rave heavy strains of the genre never existed. It makes you wish things never turned from the early 2000s and it was still an unknown scene from London with a few dudes cutting records to play them out on sound systems. Wishing for this time to come back is pointless; the 2012 sound is here to stay as long as the money is still coming in.
There’s one guy though, who from day one refused to accept the label of dubstep, even before it’s reputation was tarnished. A string of legendary and carefully selected 12” singles has made Mala the undisputed king of the sound, keeping his head down and churning out music like it’s still 2007. A bit ago he was approached by Gilles Peterson about a departure from his routine; a project collaborating with Cuban musicians to be released as a full-length album.
For Mala it’s a departure in scale, being his first LP, and a departure in technique, being the first time he’s worked with live musicians. Mala In Cuba is not the grand statement of his career, nor is it revolutionary by any means, but it’s a reminder that the genre’s best producer is still pushing his sound forward in a time most producers have jumped ship.
In recording the LP, Mala took a trip to Cuba where he performed at a few parties and took extensive field recordings of live musicians to take back to London where he used sound bites to construct the album. Structurally, things don’t venture too far from his comfort zone, but do take a step in a new direction. Mala In Cuba is a step away from the dance floor into an area more fit for home listening than anything else.
“Calle F” finds Mala producing some of the most jazz oriented and subtle productions of his career, the stuttering piano rhythms falling in between the booming bassline, similar to other cuts like “Curfew”. Two totally different sounds together like this would suffer from an awkward feeling of cut and paste sampling if Mala didn’t approach the recording process with such care and attention. Fans of the darker, club-driven sound will be appeased with the unrelenting stomp of “Cuba Electronica” where refreshingly human drums work their way into the cracks of the fundamentally DMZ low-end.
Mala In Cuba doesn’t reinvent anything, and it probably won’t have any dramatic effects on the scene at large, but that’s not an issue. Mala has earned himself the title of dubstep’s most esteemed producer, and this release will only perpetuate that, proving he’s dynamic and completely capable of progressing his sound in a fresh direction. He’s set in his ways, a relative dinosaur in his environment today, but by slightly stepping out of his lane he has taken his own palette into a new realm, proving that regardless of how things evolve, he’s going nowhere.
4 out of 5