We all know it takes a village — to raise a child, tend a garden, or create art — but first someone has to make the village. Talibah Safiya, the Memphis singer-songwriter with a recording career now spanning almost a decade, is one of those people, drawing scores of collaborators around her by dint of her vision and voice, pulling disparate threads together to craft her unique neo-soul/trap hybrid music.
That sonic identity seemed to arrive fully formed with her 2015 debut single, “Rise,” and is just as powerful today, her collaborations only growing deeper and wider. Not only does her 2024 album, Black Magic, feature some notable co-producers, she’s worked with even more since its release in February, as several remixes, the latest of which dropped last Friday, have shown.
And, as she points out, she’s been “working mostly with producers who have Memphis roots, even if some of them don’t live here anymore,” proving that you can still go big while going local. One case in point: “I worked with Brandon Deener, who is from Memphis but based in L.A. He’s actually an incredible visual artist who is currently working on a solo show in Paris that’s happening this summer. But he’s a producer as well.” Indeed, his painting was the focus of The Guardian’s profile of Deener last year, where he was called the “former producer for hip-hop and R&B royalty such as Timbaland, Missy Elliott, and Lil Wayne … now known more as a visual artist.”
Black Magic, the latest album by Talibah Safiyah.
Yet the album’s title song proves Deener is still in the music game. A bold opening shot, it builds on a vintage loop of stinging, soul-blues guitar before Safiyah’s voice decries, “We come from a Black-ass city/Black Magic … We said our pledge of allegiance/To the capital of Egypt!” It’s an anthem of sorts for Safiyah’s hometown, and the vintage soul stew loop only puts a finer historical point on it.
Deener also worked on “Jack and Jill” and “Have Mercy” (the latter featuring Marcella Simien), and both also play with locally-derived samples of roots guitar. Those flavors were very intentional, growing, Safiyah explains, from her time as artist-in-residence at the Rudi E. Scheidt School of Music last year. “The Rudi Scheidt School has the High Water Recording Company catalog, and I did a deep dive into some of that music, singing along with my guy Brandon Deener at Ari’s studio.” That would be producer/engineer Ari Morris, profiled in these pages last year as “Memphis music’s secret weapon,” who was also deeply involved in Black Magic.
“That was when I first met Ari, and how Ari and I ended up locking in,” Safiyah adds, “but I found myself really inspired by, firstly, R.L. Burnside’s ‘Bad Luck City.’ That song had me really immersed in the sound of R.L. Burnside’s voice — it sounded to me like he was improvising the song, and I loved that. It sounds like he was just making it up on the spot. And it got me thinking about Memphis. So I was super inspired by ‘Bad Luck City,’ which we sampled for the single ‘Black Magic,’ and that’s how the whole project got that name.”
Another High Water artist that Safiyah found inspiring was Jessie Mae Hemphill, though her music was not sampled for the project. “She was my guiding light for the energy of the composition of music,” Safiyah says. “My husband Bertram and I were at A. Schwab’s and he bought me a book, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, by Angela Y. Davis, which talks about how Black women have freed up the way we tell our stories through the blues.”
Hemphill would be a prime example of that process, but she has modern-day analogs. As part of her village, Safiyah enlisted a current feminist hero of the local neo-soul/hip-hop scene, MadameFraankie, for the track, “Papa Please!” Even that was touched by R.L. Burnside.
“For ‘Papa Please!’ specifically, I played Fraankie ‘Bad Luck City.’ That song is such a huge influence on a lot of the songs on the project, even if everything didn’t sample it. So I told Fraankie about a friend of mine and her relationship with her dad. I gave her a whole visual story and played her ‘Bad Luck City,’ and she went off and made the beat for ‘Papa Please!’ And when sent me that track, I was inspired right away. I wrote the song immediately, sang it for her, and that was the first one that we composed for the project.”
The track features MadameFraankie’s trademark liquid rhythm/solo guitar, but that’s not all. “She played the bass. She played the drums. She did everything on that song, there’s nobody else playing,” Safiyah enthuses.
Meanwhile, there are still more collaborations going down as Safiyah issues remixes of the album’s key tracks. The first was a brilliant reimagining of “Jack and Jill” by another soon-to-be-iconic Memphis figure, Jess Jackson, aka DJ BLINGG, who originally built a name with her sisters in the band JCKSN AVE. And as of Friday we have the album’s closer, “Delicious,” remixed by A.N.T.E. “He plays the keys and he’s done a couple other remixes for me,” notes Safiyah. “It’s really fun, and has a soulful, jazzy kind of vibe. But it feels totally different than the other version.”
True to form, “totally different” is something Safiyah will always be pursuing as she taps into her very disparate networks. “My theme throughout has been genre-bending,” she says. “I grew up listening to a lot of different types of things, and I love a lot of different types of music. I don’t think that they should be separate.”
Even in the rarefied world of gold and platinum hip-hop records, anonymity has its rewards. For producer/engineer Ari Morris, the joys of being unknown can materialize randomly, at the turn of any corner. “I used to love pulling my car up to a stop sign or a gas station and watch people bangin’ records I did,” he says today. “Nobody would have any idea that I had anything to do with it. Like, nobody knows me!” Yet this doesn’t bother Morris in the least. He’s satisfied if his mixes work their magic, as they typically do via releases by Moneybagg Yo, GloRilla, Royce da 5’9”, Rod Wave, Hitkidd, and many others.
Beyond not recognizing him personally, most passersby wouldn’t even know they were near a studio if they chanced by his workplace. He’s long preferred to work under the radar. Sitting today in his current bunker-like space, Edge Recording, he recalls his last unobtrusive location fondly. “My old studio was in Midtown across from Central BBQ, and the cooks and waitstaff there would park on my block. If I stepped out the back door, I’d see kids on their break bumpin’ records that we had just finished inside that building! But nobody knew what was going on in there.”
Such moments capture what he’s chasing when perfecting a record’s mix. “Watching their real reaction is amazing because it’s like, ‘Oh, wow, this really connected. It worked; they are feeling this.’” That last phrase is key. Morris has come as far as he has by prioritizing a mix’s feel above all else.
In pursuit of that feel, and despite his taste for nondescript studio exteriors, Morris and construction partner Karl Schwab have just built what is arguably the most advanced recording and mixing studio in the city. Walking past a dumpster and through a corrugated steel garage door, a whole world of high-end speakers, racks of gear, sound baffles, blinking lights, and mixing desks opens up as if you’ve stepped through a portal. And one room in particular makes this studio unique among all others in Memphis: the Dolby Atmos room, where 12 precisely positioned speakers create the kind of surround sound that most of us only experience in cinemas. While most studios here lean into their vintage gear and classic sounds, Morris has gone the opposite route, embracing the future of listening like no other studio owner in the city. Yet he sees it mainly as a matter of keeping up with audio’s future — and the future is now.
Ari Morris, Carlos Broady, and Royce da 5’9” (Photo: Courtesy Carlos Broady)
The Rise of Dolby Atmos
“Everything I deliver for major labels that I mix in stereo, I also mix in Atmos,” Morris says. “I also mix entire albums in Atmos that I didn’t do in stereo. Last year alone I mixed two No. 1 albums that are solely in Atmos: Lil Durk’s album 7220 and Rod Wave’s album Beautiful Mind, both of which are two of the highest selling rap albums of 2022. And I mixed them in Atmos right here in Memphis.”
He invites me to sit in the listening chair, an “X” on the floor marking the ideal spot in the room to hear all 12 speakers work their magic. When Morris pulls up his mix for Rod Wave’s “MJ Story” from the artist’s second 2022 release, Jupiter’s Diary: 7 Day Theory, I’m at first shocked by the very low-fidelity sounds of the song’s intro, which turns out to be a sample of “Teenage Dirtbag” by Wheatus. That’s just a sonic sleight of hand, though. When the bass and kick drum hit, it feels like they’re inside you, deep slabs of oomph that rattle you even as they leave space for the airy music floating out in middle space.
Even more so than the experience of Dolby Atmos in a cinema, the music mixed to this format creates a world of space far beyond stereo; in addition to left and right, sounds can be precisely positioned in front of or behind you, above or below you, or from a faraway horizon to deep inside you. As such systems become more widespread, and simulations of Dolby Atmos’ spatial illusion become common in headphones, this immersive listening is becoming the industry standard. Yet it’s still in flux during this transitional time.
“Atmos is still evolving,” Morris says. “And a lot of that evolution right now has been on the tech side and then the engineering side. But it’s not really going to finish until the tech grows on the listeners. Because it’s the listeners who dictate the decisions that we make in the studio. I’m not in here trying to make the perfect record for another engineer. I’m trying to make the perfect record for the fan of that artist. It’s a hell of an experience. The first time I listened to it, the music was something I’d heard a million times before, but the hairs on my arm stood out. I hope more people can have that experience because it’s really crazy when sound isn’t just around you but it comes in and out of you.”
The way Morris sees it, the cutting edge of what consumers will adopt starts with cars and headphones. “If you use Apple headphones, they have their own interpretation of a Dolby Atmos music experience called Spatial Audio. Tidal now has Atmos available. Amazon HD does a binaural rendering of an Atmos mix. And Mercedes now has cars with spatial in their 2023 models. Last year, Tesla became upgradable to Dolby Atmos. I can put more low end into records now because cars and headphones can output more low end.”
Morris (right) in the studio with assistant Logan Schmitz (Photo: Justin Fox Burks)
The Feel
Still, for Morris, even such cutting-edge tech boils down to one thing: the feel — as in “That’s How I Feel” by Young Dolph from his Morris-mixed Bulletproof album, which also included “100 Shots.” A plaque honoring that single as a certified gold record testifies to how many listeners felt it. While Morris could have more than 50 such gold or platinum record plaques on his wall, this one is special, partly because he and the late Dolph connected so early on. “Me and Dolph met in the studio and we just kind of caught a vibe. I mixed a bunch of his early singles, like ‘Not No More’ or ‘Choppa on the Couch’ with Gucci Mane. I think it was 19 total releases that we did together.” Yet it’s his work on Bulletproof that stands out to him, because of its feel. “On ‘100 Shots,’ the bass doesn’t drop till damn near a minute in,” he enthuses. “But when it drops, I mean, it rattles the chandeliers in the venue!”
To his finely tuned ear, it’s more than just making the bass louder — he hears a distinct approach to sound in every artist he works with. “I know which artists like their kick [drum] to run the record versus who likes their bass to run the record.” And Morris isn’t just pumping up the bass as an exercise in technology. He believes it’s more primal than that. “It takes us back to the campfires, man. Before melody there was rhythm, right?”
Yet, he observes, getting to that primal reaction requires his engineering mind to work in overdrive. “It takes a neurosis for the details to do it. It takes like an obsessive neurosis,” he notes. But that laser-like focus also helps him tune in to what makes every artist unique. “When you really listen to rap music, every artist has their own kind of sound and presentation of how things exist. With the established artists, I try to respect where they sit already. And if I’m working with a new artist, which has always been one of my favorite things to do, it’s discovering that unique position. So you know it’s them from the onset, you feel them. Because the more personal it is, the more it’s going to connect with the listener.”
As he told Sound on Sound magazine last year, “For me it’s all about feel and vibe. It’s all heart for me. … I just kind of close my eyes, and go.” He details how this applies to his work with Moneybagg Yo. “When I started working with Bagg again in 2019, I went for this vibe, which sits in the tonality of his vocal and in the placement. … Bagg hates the traditional ear candy like delay throws, reverb swells, reversing things and panning them around, and so on. It’s not how he feels music. It takes you out of the moment. Instead, the feel with him is bone-dry, raw power.”
Beyond mixing, this dedication to feel also translates into how he records. “As a recording engineer and a producer, my job is to keep everybody from thinking in the studio. The minute you start thinking too hard, you’re second-guessing yourself. My approach is, however we’re feeling that day, let’s get the idea out. If we don’t like it tomorrow, let’s try it with tomorrow’s feelings. But let’s not stop and second-guess ourselves halfway through. Let’s just finish it.”
The bottom line, as he sees it, is freedom: “In the studio, we’ve got to be like children. Otherwise, it’s not freedom. It’s forced. And then we might as well go home.”
(Photo: Justin Fox Burks)
“Not about the plaques on the walls”
That attitude has won him a lot of repeat clients. Despite Morris’ technical obsessions, they feel they can stay loose while they’re creating. That in turn creates some long-term friendships. “You’re always trying to let yourself be vulnerable,” Morris says. “You want to be around people that you’re comfortable with. Having artists and producers feeling comfortable with me on that level just makes me feel awesome. It’s not about the plaques on the walls and all that shit.”
That’s exactly why Memphis-born Carlos “Six July” Broady, producer of numerous hits like The Notorious B.I.G.’s “What’s Beef” and Ma$e’s “24 Hours to Live,” keeps coming back to Morris, who he’s known for well over a decade. “He’s one of maybe two or three mixing engineers that I can send my work to and I know I won’t have a complaint,” says Broady. “I’ve been doing this for 30 years, so when it comes to hip-hop and beat-making and producing, I’m real picky, but Ari knows. I send records to him because he already knows what I like. And that’s important, when you bet on a relationship.”
While the plaques don’t matter, Broady and Morris are rightfully proud of an honor they recently acquired: certifying their Grammy nomination for Best Rap Album of 2020. “Even if Ari doesn’t understand an album immediately,” notes Broady, “he’s gonna do the research to figure out what’s the best way to approach this record. That was what was important about The Allegory, and that’s what made him stand out amongst everybody else, and why I pitched him to be the mix engineer for it.”
That album’s Grammy nomination was the first for rapper Royce da 5’9”, who’s been in the music business for more than 20 years. “We ended up in Detroit for 10 days,” recalls Morris, “and it’s the first album that Royce da 5’9” produced entirely himself. It’s a huge concept album, and he’s been one of my favorite rappers from my childhood. Like, I grew up in New Jersey, man. There’s a lot of heavy metal, hard-core, and basement hip-hop. That was the universe that I grew up in as a child. I lived in Jersey during the Jersey hard-core scene, so of course I was into that. And rap music and hard-core metal are so similar in so many ways.”
Coming to the University of Memphis in the late 2000s to study recording engineering only encouraged Morris’ eclecticism, especially when he started interning at local studios. “I was lucky that really good people took me under their wing,” he says. “Like the late Skip McQuinn taught me how music works. And then Nil Jones, the producer and bass player, I assisted him for many years and that’s how I learned how to mix records. He taught me how to get paid. And I also apprenticed for the rock producer, Malcolm Springer.”
Broady sees that jumble of styles from Morris’ New Jersey youth as a key to his success. “Here you have a guy that’s able to mix hip-hop, rock, heavy metal, alternative pop, and R&B! I mean, you don’t have a lot of guys that can jump from genre to genre like that and can do a great job at it. But Ari understands all of those different musical types, you know?”
Morris’ success in Memphis — in multiple styles — has been so great that now, at age 34, New Jersey seems to be shrinking in his rearview mirror. Unlike many in the hip-hop industry who relocate to Atlanta or Los Angeles upon finding success, Morris is firmly committed to making Memphis grow. Beyond his mixing and engineering work, he’s taken to producing local artists, like Talibah Safiya, who are committed to their art as a way of life more than any career success. “You’ve got to be bigger than your music,” he says. “You’ve got to be a movement.”
And the producer/engineer sees more artists of that caliber here than anywhere else. “Memphis’ primary export to the world is culture,” he adds. “Our artists, homegrown artists, have come to dictate the culture. They not only just become popular; they dictate the culture. That’s why I stayed here. Whatever we do, you know, it just ends up being fucking cool.”
Morris himself can’t quite explain why that is. “There’s something in the water down here, man!” he exclaims. “It breeds this innate musical talent. Part of me regrets that I didn’t grow up playing guitar in a church down here. I would be an infinitely better musician today. Because there’s just this thing. And the city is waking up. I think everybody sees that. It’s not the same city it was in 2008, 2009, when I started living here. It’s not the same place at all — in a good way. The music industry is waking up. I can dream really big here and make those dreams happen. And do it on my own terms.”
