The road to recovery from a major health condition can happen in stages. Confronting a disease when you’re in its grips, determined to keep moving forward, is one thing; putting yourself out in the world once the worst of it is over is another. Having gone through hell, you realize things about yourself — things you can’t forget.
That’s one way into WANDS, the new instrumental album by IMAKEMADBEATS, aka James Dukes, which arguably marks a new aesthetic high point in the producer’s career. That much will be evident on Saturday, November 16th, at the Pink Palace’s Sharpe Planetarium, when MAD (as he is known) will premiere the album live, in an extravaganza of light and projections that will likely be seen as a defining moment in Memphis’ Afrofuturist scene.
It should come as no surprise that the producer who named his dream studio Outerspace has been fascinated with the cosmos, or characters like the Mars-dwelling Watchmen character Doctor Manhattan, all his life. “The only field trip I cared about as a kid was to the planetarium. I didn’t care about nothing else!” he says, as we chat amid the glowing buttons and dials of Outerspace.
“I’ve always been attached to space and the unknown,” he explains. “In WANDS, the general idea is that I have to leave here to find out where home is. The very first song is about me leaving here. The second song is the soundtrack to me making my way through the Earth’s atmosphere. The third is about flying through stars. The fourth is about me running into an alien that is telling me where to go to find home. The fifth song is about me descending onto that planet where there are clouds of bubbles that sing to me. And so that song is called ‘Choir of Bubbles.’”
If such a tale captures the album’s epic sweep, that last title hints at the album’s sonic palette. While there are indeed mad beats throughout, sporting MAD’s trademark glitches and tweaks, there are also orchestral passages both ethereal and bombastic, at times sounding eerily like the ’70s synth-meister Tomita. It’s an interstellar trip in audio form, in which you’re never sure if you’re hearing a sample or an intricate new composition by MAD himself. The track “I’m Losing My Mind I’m OK” even features lyrics, hauntingly sung by Tiffany Harmon.
Another track, “James Michael,” features the producer — typically seen behind a console of sample triggers — playing a solo keyboard passage. And that, it turns out, is a clue to how the entire album came to be, starting with MAD’s decision to take videoconference music lessons (full disclosure, from me) during Covid’s early months of social distancing. As with the great Sun Ra himself, MAD’s latest voyage to outer space began through that trans-dimensional portal known as a “piano.”
“I wanted to be a jazz pianist since I was a teenager,” he says. “I just didn’t have any kind of keyboard. What I did have was access to old records and a sampler. So, you know, I had a professional career in music before I had an instrument. Then I bought this keyboard, the Korg SV-1, with the weighted keys on it, and it feels like a real piano. And I felt drawn to that, like, ‘Yo. This is my time to actually learn this.’”
But eventually there was an even more compelling reason to play. During his first forays into playing keyboards, “I was just messing around and having fun,” MAD says, “until I got sick.” Just as Covid emerged, the producer contracted a rare autoimmune condition which initially threatened his motor skills. “You know,” he reflects, “I spent my whole life making things with my hands, and suddenly I couldn’t use my hands, with any real accuracy, for a couple of months. That scared the shit out of me!” He points to our surroundings to underscore his point. “I mean, I’m literally surrounded by buttons and knobs.”
Nonetheless, he kept at it, often with Kid Maestro twiddling the dials under MAD’s direction, and eventually the material that became MAD Songs, Volume 1 and Volume 1.5 came together. Those albums stood as proof positive that he could soldier on artistically through the hardship of his illness. Yet after that came a recovery of sorts, and it was in that period that the seeds of WANDS were planted.
“A few months later, my hands came back and I started hitting you up.” MAD was a student of singular focus and determination. “One of the top things I remember in those lessons was how you would slide from one note to the next, and it would just add these, like, half step emotions. Which I am addicted to: half step movements in any chord progression I ever write.”
But beyond the raw knowledge of harmonies and melodies, or the basic physical therapy of strengthening his hands, playing the piano became a skeleton key, thanks to the infinite library of sounds available to any producer now, into the world of composing and arranging. (If this was a film, we would insert the heroic montage here.) Taking long sabbaticals of studying only piano, MAD began experimenting with the complex jazz harmonies that had always fascinated him. At that point, pairing music’s infinite plane of harmonics with his love of space was an easy leap to make. That in turn led him to an insight into his own condition.
“There’s no one else in my family with any sort of autoimmune disorder. So for me to have this is an extreme anomaly. And so it made me wonder, you know, maybe I’m an alien?” Which brings us back to the story of WANDS, soon to be premiered musically in the planetarium (on his birthday, no less), but later to be revealed narratively, a bit further down the road. Look for a second edition of the album early next year that includes voiceovers recounting the tale in all its world-building glory. In the meantime, just know that an alien walks among us, and he is MAD. “I literally was telling my mom a couple weeks ago,” he says. “I was like, ‘Mom, if you didn’t actually remember birthing me, I would swear I’m not from here. You are the sole evidence that I am from Planet Earth.”
James Dukes (IMAKEMADBEATS) spoke the truth last week after threats shut down several Memphis-area schools.
“Sending our kids to school should not be like this,” Dukes said on Facebook.
Never Forget
Originally posted to Twitter by Ryan Poe/Reposted to Facebook by Myrlon Lowery
The MEMernet remembered that 15 years ago, then-acting Memphis Mayor Myron Lowery fist-bumped the Dalai Lama and said, “Hello, Dalai!”
Doughty/Duck Dunn
Posted to Facebook by Mike Doughy
Memphis transplant Mike Doughty reunited with his band Soul Coughing recently for a tour. He found a little Memphis backstage in California.
“Thank you to The Fillmore in [San Francisco] for providing Soul Coughing, as per the backstage rider, an original painting of Donald ‘Duck’ Dunn,” Doughty wrote on Facebook.
You might think you know UNAPOLOGETIC. How could a Memphis music fan not know the likes of Cameron Bethany, AWFM, and PreauXX — or producers like C Major, Kid Maestro, and IMAKEMADBEATS? And yet there’s always more simmering below the collective’s surface than what its public-facing (or face-masking) side reveals. For example, at 10 p.m. this Friday, August 30th, at Bar DKDC, some talent whose faces may seem new to UNAPOLOGETIC fans will top the bill. And yet, paradoxically, they’ve been involved in the organization’s background for years, part of what’s always “simmering below the surface” there.
Take Nubia Yasin, whose first appearance on an Unapologetic release was in 2019, contributing to the track “Eve & Delilah” on the collective’s showcase album, Stuntarious, Vol. 4. It’s telling that her contribution to that track was, as she notes, “the poem at the end,” a spoken word passage, for that has been what her most public work has been centered on ever since … until now.
Moreover, her writing has been unflinchingly political, from her poetry to her more overtly activist work, including a stint as “chief storyteller” for the Black arts nonprofit Tone and her 2020 TEDx talk on gentrification. As she told Memphis Magazine in 2021, “Because I’m a Black woman, all the intersections that I exist in don’t allow me to be apolitical.” And her response to politics, and much of the world, has always been through the written word, which “informs everything,” as she said in 2021. “I’m multidisciplinary for sure. I do visual art, I do installation work, I do film, but the writing portion informs all of it. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know how to read. And I’ve been writing since I had the motor skills to hold a pencil.”
Nubia Yasin (Photo: A.C. Bullard)
And yet, ironically, her writing originally went hand in hand with her voice. “I was actually a songwriter before I was a poet,” she says now, “and I stepped away from singing because somewhere along the journey it just started feeling too audacious. Like, there’s something really bold about opening up and singing. So I stopped doing it when I was in my early teens, and pivoted more towards poetry because I felt more confident in that. It wasn’t until 2022 or 2023 when I worked as IMAKEMADBEATS’ assistant for a year, and I was just surrounded by music all day, every day, that my urge to do it just got bigger than my shame about not being perfect at it.”
Returning to music brought things full circle, in a sense. “When I was a kid, my first dream ever was to be a singer. I did choir, all those things. But I have a pretty unorthodox voice — it’s pretty deep for a woman vocalist. As I got older and deeper, I felt really, really insecure for a really long time about my singing. But over time I got prouder of how different I sound, and now I’m in a place where I’m really excited to share that with the world.”
Working with “MAD,” UNAPOLOGETIC’s founder and key producer, directly informed her return to singing, as the tracks that will be playing under her at Bar DKDC were collaboratively created by the two of them. The final product might surprise casual UNAPOLOGETIC fans, its reference points being more indie rock than hip hop. In truth, the label has always been eclectic, from Aaron James to Cameron Bethany, with many releases trading heavily on the poetry and wit of the lyrics. Yet Yasin follows her own star, her musings flowing over meandering melodies that might suggest The Smiths — if fronted by Nina Simone — or equally unpredictable destinations.
Speaking of long traditions at UNAPOLOGETIC, Eillo first showed up on my radar during my 2018 group interview at their old studio, when IMAKEMADBEATS quipped, “this young guy, 16 years old, he’s actually the son of Quinn McGowan, who is part of Iron Mic Coalition. He’s an intern here, and he’s amazingly talented.” By the following year, he was performing on the Stuntarious, Vol. 4 group project and was even name-checked in that album’s recurring comic book-like narration, where an arch villain decries, “And this child, Eillo, has continued to outwit you!”
Today, Eillo laughs at that moment and the talent who played the villain. “That was my dad on the vocal,” he chuckles. “He would be a super dope voice actor.”
Over five years later, Eillo is no longer the “child,” having proven himself on countless contributions to recording sessions. In 2021, he was listed, with MAD, as coproducer of “Depression and Redemption” on MAD Songs, Vol. 1. Later, the multi-instrumental parts he brought to Aaron James’ Nobody Really Makes Love Anymore were key elements of that album’s musicality, and his other flourishes, like the jazz piano outro to PreauXX’s “Regret” in 2022, could be breathtaking.
It all has flowed from Eillo’s fingers, who grew up in a creative, musical world. Not only is his father an especially savvy rapper; he drums and is a comic artist. His recently departed mother, Adrian Liggins, was a self-taught pianist and a well-respected soul singer under the stage name Mahogany. “She was an amazing singer songwriter,” Eillo says of her now, and credits much of his musicality to her support over the years.
This Friday, that musicality will be on full display as an attraction in its own right. “I want to do all the things that I love about music,” Eillo confides. “So I’m going to be doing some raps, doing some singing, some original songs, and doing some, just, playing — just playing and building a vibe. I’m a huge believer in having the music speak for itself. I’m not the best with words, like talking to people and stuff like that. But when it comes to music, that’s the stuff that I want to speak for me. I guess it’s the purest way I can express myself.”
Annabeth Parker and Kelly English (Photos: Michael Donahue)
This year’s Le Bon Appetit fundraiser was better than “bon.” It was “fabuleuse.”
More than 1,000 people attended the sold out Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital fundraiser, which was held June 8th at The Kent. About 33 chefs participated in the event, which featured tastings from local and out-of-town restaurants.
IMAKEMADBEATSLiz Nguyễn and Michael GulottaSarah Cai and Arturo Leighton
“The year was fantastic,” says Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital president Dr. Trey Eubanks. “I’ve been to most of these — I may have missed one year — and this was the best one yet.”
Chef Kelly English, whose restaurants include Restaurant Iris, and Le Bonheur Club hosted the event, which included a new addition, “Le Bon Appetit Late Night,” hosted by English and chef Phillip Dewayne of Park & Cherry.
Rebecca and Jason SeversVictoria and Gene Robinson
Music was by members of Unapologetic and Frances Berry Moreno.
English, a founder of the event, has “just been fabulous. And he’s always tweaking and thinking about what we need to do next time.”
Co-chair Phillip Dewayne “was also incredible in putting his spin on new changes,” Eubanks says, adding “to keep it new and fresh and fun.”
August 17, 2018, was a historic night in the Bluff City. A new space in the newly renovated Crosstown Concourse, The Green Room, was about to enjoy its inaugural concert — the culmination of years of planning. A sizable audience had gathered to hear the music of celebrated avant-garde pioneer John Cage, and a hush fell over the room as the lights dimmed. Then Jenny Davis, a flutist in the genre-defying Blueshift Ensemble, stepped up and began to play … a cactus.
Jenny Davis (Photo: Jamie Harmon)
Around her was a scene from a gardening shop. Cacti of different sizes were arrayed on a table, and Davis was systematically plucking the thorns of each plant as if it were a drum. Each movement resonated over the sound system; the cacti were outfitted with microphone pickups. It was as if we’d all shrunk to the size of geckos, immersed in a world of desert greenery, every brush of the needles an arpeggio.
For lovers of unusual sounds and textures, Davis’ performance was captivating. But it also marked the beginning of an avant-garde renaissance that is putting Memphis on the map of all that is strange and fascinating in 21st century music. It was only fitting that Davis was making the sounds, as that night foreshadowed the extent to which she, as programmer of Crosstown Arts’ musical performances, would be making waves. As it turns out, she’s only one of a host of players and presenters who are introducing Memphis audiences to sounds well off the beaten path. Beyond that, she sees no need to define what the music is. It’s here to stay, whatever you call it. “The avant-garde realm is hard to describe,” Davis says. “It becomes kind of tricky. Maybe it’s not even necessary to always describe something as being in one genre or another.”
The Cactus in the Room: A State of Mind
As Davis notes, playing Cage’s “Child of Tree” that night was a prescient grand opening. “That was the first concert we ever did in The Green Room,” she notes, “which I love. We christened the room with some John Cage!” In keeping with that, the space has become a key venue for musicians who want nothing more than to be listened to, and it’s likely rooted in the context of that first show. As part of the 2018 Continuum Festival, also organized by Davis, attendees could learn of the different states of mind that most avant-garde music demands, with talks on “Suggestions on How to Listen to Contemporary Classical Music” or a “Mindful Listening Workshop” based on composer Pauline Oliveros’ sound and meditation activities.
The seriousness suggested by such presentations is often belied by the sheer playfulness of the music. Beyond cacti, for example, the John Cage tribute also included his “Imaginary Landscape No. 4,” in which players adjusted the frequencies and volumes of 12 transistor radios. Whether whimsical or disturbing, the one thing that most avant-garde, experimental, or “out” music has in common is the need for deep listening. While B-Side Memphis or the Lamplighter Lounge have also cultivated scenes for strange music, The Green Room and its big sibling, Crosstown Theater, have set the standard of spaces that encourage silence.
Art Edmaiston, a veteran saxophonist of more conventional R&B, soul, and rock ensembles, has played enough noisy bars in his storied career to really appreciate silence. “You know, people wander into bars just to have a drink, and then they’ll say, ‘What is this? Why is a guy dragging a music stand across the floor? What’s going on with the flame thrower?’” he says with a chuckle. Such a crowd may not be tuned in to the subtleties of experimental music, and that can impact the playing itself. “The other thing is how quiet some of the music can be,” he notes. “We’re all listening. If you’re not in a listening environment, which means the crowd has to be quiet, then it’s hard for us to communicate, almost telepathically, and everybody’s going to miss what’s going on.”
What’s Going On
Edmaiston is a key figure in the local music landscape, and his involvement in the free improvisational group SpiralPhonics is indicative of just how much is happening on the cutting edge here. As he describes it, just having a venue for avant-garde music has made all the difference. “It’s hard for our little group to find places,” he says. “Revenue and venue, it’s all kinda in there together. You’ve got to find people. Listeners needed!” That has usually required staying on the more accessible side of the street. “Playing commercial music, you have a structure and vocabulary applicable to that situation. If you come in playing like Albert Ayler on [a track like] ‘Take Me to the River,’ you’re not going to be called back. So throughout most of my career, I was trying to assimilate, trying to be a studio musician. I’ve had a life of doing that, but never lost my desire to be on the more artistic side of things.”
When drummer Terence Clark proposed collaborating in a more improvisational context, and they joined forces with guitarist Logan Hanna to form SpiralPhonics, the mere existence of a venue helped them to manifest their vision. “We only played sporadically,” he recalls. “So we booked The Green Room in order to make us get our stuff together.” Ultimately, the gig not only brought their group into focus; it led to their debut album. “The Green Room being a listening room, that’s the spot to do it,” says Edmaiston. “That’s where we recorded our Argot Session. It was a live performance that we recorded there, and we couldn’t have done it anywhere else. It would take a lot more tries to get good takes and a quiet environment somewhere else. Your head space has to be right.”
Others note the resurgence of “out” music as well. Chad Fowler, a saxophonist, woodwind player, composer, and producer from Arkansas, studied at the University of Memphis in the 1990s, and the experimental music scene here at that time had a profound impact on him. Having then left town, he was surprised upon his return over a decade later. “I felt, when I first moved back to Memphis six or seven years ago, like there was a real dearth of creative music happening. It was kind of disappointing. I felt it had been stronger in the ’90s. However, since then it feels like it’s changed. A lot of it is due to Jenny Davis and Blueshift. Crosstown and B-Side have made a huge difference.”
The scene’s personal impact on Fowler is in turn reflecting back on the local environment. Having ultimately settled back in Arkansas, he’s nevertheless a regular in the avant-garde music world of Memphis, even as he also increases his profile in the New York experimental scene. His Mahakala Music label, focused on experimental jazz, has built on associations he forged in the ’90s Memphis scene, with players like Marc Franklin, Chris Parker, and Kelley Hurt, and Anders Griffen often appearing on Mahakala releases today. But he’s also used his and others’ connections to New York, Chicago, and New Orleans to create ensembles of world-class players from elsewhere, often bringing them to Memphis.
Dopolarians at The Green Room (Photo: Jack T. Adcock)
As Fowler notes, “It’s kind of weird because the same people might be on, like, a New York Times best of jazz year-end list but then also playing in a room the size of a closet for a tiny crowd in Brooklyn. We might get better audiences in Memphis for the same music.” He points to a gig by one of Mahakala’s “all-star” groups, Dopolarians. “With the Dopolarians show, I think William Parker was blown away by how great the energy was when we were there in The Green Room — by how many people came out, how engaged the audience was. It was a good experience.”
Collaborating with William Parker, a highly respected free jazz bassist and co-organizer of the Vision Festival, “New York City’s premier live free jazz event,” according to TheNew York Times, has been a boon to Fowler and Mahakala, arising quite organically from Fowler’s earliest free jazz experiences. Parker played on the debut album of Memphian Frank Lowe in 1973, as Lowe’s star was rising. Ultimately, Lowe would join Alice Coltrane’s band and enjoy a solo career of some renown, yet would still return to Memphis and jam with the likes of Fowler, Franklin, Chris Parker, and other University of Memphis students. Now, Fowler carries that inspiration back to New York on a regular basis, often playing with William Parker in various ensembles and recording projects. Mahakala’s star is now rising as well. “The first record we put out was on Rolling Stone’s end-of-year jazz roundup list,” says Fowler, “and since then, pretty frequently, we’ve been mentioned in Jazziz, JazzTimes, DownBeat, and all the go-to jazz publications. It seems the label is becoming one of the most respected of the genre, even though it’s very new.”
Lately, the links between Memphis and leaders of free jazz from the Northeast have only strengthened, as when drummer Ra Kalam, aka Bob Moses, who’s been on the cutting edge of the free improvisation world since the ’60s, relocated to Memphis permanently. Edmaiston recently played with the drummer on a New Year’s Eve show and was surprised at his embrace of more traditional R&B. Edmaiston recalls, “Ra Kalam told us, ‘Hey man, that was ‘Cleo’s Back!’ I recorded that in 1967 with Larry Coryell and Jim Pepper. We used to play it all the time!’ So that was kind of wild. He can play inside, but he’s developed into something else. When he plays himself, he says, it’s like he’s got to be in Europe to be expressive. Over here, less people want to hear that. Over there, he’s celebrated for it.” Yet now, with improvisational music on the rise here, that’s changing. On January 18th, Ra Kalam will be holding a master class and concert at Nelson Drum Shop in Nashville.
New Music, from Punks to P-basses to Piccolos
If there’s an uptick in free jazz and improvisational groups like SpiralPhonics and Fowler’s various projects, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Indeed, since Jenny Davis and Jonathan Kirkscey founded Blueshift Ensemble, a loose collection of Memphis Symphony Orchestra players with a penchant for experimental music, an Iceberg has orbited them — for that’s the name of a composers’ collective that collaborates with Blueshift every August to bring their works to life. “I like to have some new stuff along with some more familiar sounds, and that’s a nice way to introduce new things to audiences,” says Davis. “Blueshift’s work with Iceberg New Music, the composer collective out of New York, encapsulates that idea, too, because it’s a group of 10 composers, some of them more on the experimental, avant-garde side of things and some whose works are more lyrical and tonal, so you have the whole spectrum of what’s going on in new classical music today.”
Other avenues have long been available for the edgier side of the classical world, though they tend to be tucked into programs that showcase more traditional works. Conrad Tao’s “Spoonful,” commissioned in 2020 by the Iris Orchestra in honor of Memphis’ bicentennial, was a New Music tour de force, pivoting from cacophony to explosions of orchestral texture to delicate piano lines in a heartbeat and even a sample of Charley Patton’s “A Spoonful Blues.” It lost none of its power by being sandwiched between works by Haydn and Brahms. And many such experimental works continue to percolate out of the classical world.
A more hybrid approach was concocted by David Collins’ Frog Squad, when they premiered his arrangements of the music of Erik Satie at The Green Room in 2021. Turning the composer’s original sparse arrangements into showcases for a more jazz-oriented octet represented a perfect balance between accessibility and “out” music, as the players took solos with the abandon of a free jazz group, even as they remained grounded in the composer’s classic works. This year, they’re set to release a similar treatment of Horace Silver’s music and an album of all originals.
Misterioso Africano (Photo: Courtesy Khari Wynn)
Frog Squad’s bassist, Khari Wynn, is a virtuoso in his own right. While best known as one of Public Enemy’s go-to guitarists, his real passion is a kind of Afrofuturism first pioneered by his hero, Sun Ra, yet channeled through a thousand other influences he’s absorbed over the years as he plays under the name Misterioso Africano, or a few years back, The Energy Disciples.
But there’s plenty of experimentation coming from less-schooled musicians as well. Goner Records has long waxed enthusiastic for musical risk-takers, and in recent years they’ve brought many edge-walking groups to the city, from the surrealist big band sounds of Fred Lane to the free improvisational textures of Wrest to Tatsuya Nakatani’s Gong Orchestra. The latter wowed music fans gathered at Off the Walls Arts last year, part of that gallery space’s increased staging of “out” musical events under its roof.
The label has also played host to some of the city’s more rock-adjacent groups who test the boundaries of conventional musical ideas through combinations of electronic music and guitar noise, from Aquarian Blood to Nots to Optic Sink, who all offer servings of noise and synth madness to variations on the big beat of rock. Yet other, less-punk groups are dipping their toes into strange waters at the same time. Salo Pallini’s new independently released album advises it be filed under “Progressive Latin Space Country,” and while that obscures the heavy dollop of rock in their sound, it does capture their everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach. They’ll be playing a record release show on January 20th at — you guessed it — The Green Room.
Some of these artists are also featured in the annual Memphis Concrète festival of electronic and experimental music, also centered in and around Crosstown, set to resume this June after some Covid-related setbacks.
IMAKEMADBEATS at Continuum Fest with Delara Hashemi (Photo: Jamie Harmon)
Meanwhile, more hip-hop-adjacent sounds are percolating through the city. Unapologetic, who have long celebrated strangeness and vulnerability in their edgy hip-hop productions, now have a dedicated studio space, and producer IMAKEMADBEATS is enthused about the possibilities for combining traditional beat production with live players free to create new textures in a more spacious setting. “We’re all electronic/hip-hop-based producers who play instruments,” says IMAKEMADBEATS. “Finally having the kind of space that allows us to easily incorporate live instrumentation into our music is a game changer here. Because our minds are decades-trained to think of warping sounds in ways never done traditionally, but now we can combine that with traditional instruments in a space sonically set up to present it in an amazing way. Our producer engineers aren’t just band recording people or rap recording people. They are that and everything in between. We just needed space. Now it’s time to take off.”
MonoNeon and Daru Jones (Photo: Jamie Harmon)
Of course, the kitchen-sink approach has also been perfected by MonoNeon, whose transpositions of Cardi B tirades into carefully pitched bass solos and whose jams in his YouTube offerings may be the most experimental music of all. While he often records at home, he’s also branched out with other producers, including his work with Unapologetic. Like most of these artists, he’s appeared at The Green Room and/or Crosstown Theater multiple times. So it is that we must give credit where credit is due, as Crosstown Arts sits squarely at the center of the avant-garde revival. As Amy Schaftlein, co-host of the Sonosphere podcast and radio show, notes, “Jenny Davis has been doing such an amazing job of getting great artists to come to Crosstown Theater and The Green Room. She’s continued in that vein of ‘Let’s try to get folks to Memphis who may not hit us on their tour.’” Often recruiting acts on their way to or from Knoxville’s Big Ears Festival, Davis has brought a steady stream of experimental and jazz artists to town, the likes of which have not been seen in decades. This March and April alone, Crosstown will feature Deepstaria Enigmatica, Makaya McCraven, SpiralPhonics, The Bad Plus + Marc Ribot and the Jazz-Bins, Tarta Relena, Ami Dang, and Xiu Xiu.
All of which is making the city a richer, more connected community. As Davis says, “I like the challenge of hearing something new. And [it] can be jarring at first. But then if you go back a second time, you start to see the patterns and it’s like learning a new language. I think that keeps things interesting.”
For our final “regular season” Music Video Monday of the year, we’re featuring something a bit different.
Unapologetic has been spending the last few months building a new studio in Cooper-Young called Outerspace. Mastermind producer IMAKEMADBEATS teamed up with Tylon Monger for this video tour of the new musical mecca. As you would expect from Unapologetic, it’s not your average unboxing video, although there is some boxing. Or, at least some light wrestling.
We’ll be back next week with our Top Ten Memphis Music Videos of 2022, but in the meantime, here’s a trip to Outerspace.
If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.
Andromeda, the main control room in Outerspace (Photo: IMAKEMADBEATS)
I had heard talk of a new project from the Unapologetic collective, so I called IMAKEMADBEATS out of the blue. No texting. We’re both aware that this is a dying art. “I’m actually pro-‘just calling,’” he says. “I want to take it back to years ago, when you just called people.” Still, it’s not every day you can ask someone you phone where they are and hear them say, “I’m in outer space right now.”
Of course, by “outer space,” MAD (as he’s called) really meant Outerspace, the new recording studio recently opened by Unapologetic. If that alone doesn’t sound too noteworthy, just take a look inside, as a few of us were able to back in August. The first public event at the facility on Central Avenue was a listening event for the new album by Aaron James, Nobody Really Makes Love Anymore. Back then, many rooms were still under construction, but the main control room and live tracking room were finished. To all of us gathered there, MAD said, “I wanted a space that, when I walked into it, could remove all the stresses I had to go through to get here. Just kind of wipe them off my shoulder as I enter the space. That’s why when you walk in here, you’re immediately slapped in the face with a vibe. Because that’s what I need, is to get slapped in the face with a vibe. It’s perfect for me and for us.”
Outerspace hallway (Photo: James Dukes | Facebook)
That vibe is in a colorful, electric, semi-science-fiction vein, practically daring you to innovate. And such an environment was of the upmost importance as the collective created their first standalone facility. MAD recalls its genesis in the pandemic. “I look back and think, ‘Wow, we did all of this [recorded work before Outerspace] from spare bedrooms in my house. That’s kinda crazy.’ But when 2020 hit us, my son was almost 3. He was growing up and needed more space. The pandemic sent us all into our own caves, in isolation. I began to consider, ‘How do I interact with so many people, yet keep my family safe and separated?’ The obvious answer was to find a new space.”
But why call it Outerspace? As MAD explains, “I’m a big comic book guy, and I love Watchmen. There’s a classic image from that graphic novel, of Doctor Manhattan on Mars. When he needed to silence his mind and get some peace, he would just go and sit on Mars by himself. So when I thought about putting a place together, I wanted it to be for me what Mars was for Doctor Manhattan.”
As the Unapologetic team progressed, the logic of their chosen motif unfolded. “So if you go to Outerspace, you fly into Andromeda, the main control room,” explains MAD. “And then maybe you end up on another planet. So we call our live room Another Planet. And if there’s life there, you expect to see water and vegetation. So our two isolation booths in the live room are called The River, for the water, and The Garden, for the vegetation.” True to its name, The Garden is festooned with roses.
But there’s more, all designed with considerable care by the group’s various members. As MAD noted on his Facebook page, “I felt like most studios were designed by engineers, for engineers. I just wanted mine to be overwhelmingly for artists.” And that’s what the various rooms convey. Butterfly, the smaller studio, is named after the colliding Butterfly Galaxies. Then there are the hallways, the dressing room, the bathroom, and The Shuttle. “The Shuttle is the room I’m most excited about,” says MAD. “Our room dedicated to visual media and visual arts. It’s stocked with high-end computer equipment, microphones, cameras, Go-Pros. It’s acoustically treated, but you can take off the treatment if you want bare, white walls.” At last, Unapologetic can integrate all their output under one roof.
“One day, just for fun, we tried to exercise this new assembly line,” says MAD. “You can record here, mix here, and shoot the video here. So PreauXX cut a song in Butterfly, then I began mixing it in Andromeda, and we bounced out a rough mix so they could shoot a music video for it in The Shuttle. Three or four hours later, PreauXX had a new song mixed, mastered, and filmed.”
Last summer, President Joe Biden declared Juneteenth a federal holiday, making it the first holiday to be approved since Martin Luther King Jr. Day was established in 1983. In honor of this year’s Juneteenth, a relatively under-celebrated and under-appreciated holiday, TONE is hosting a weekend celebration, complete with a Saturday night gala and a Sunday festival.
This will be the first time TONE will host these events in conjunction with each other. Kai Ross, a visual artist and marketing manager at TONE, explains that the first (and only, so far) gala was held in 2019. “A gala was always supposed to be the plan,” they say, but due to Covid, TONE wasn’t ready to bring it back until now.
This year’s gala at Beale Street Landing is Afrofuturism-themed, with a request for attendees to wear Afrofuturistic attire. “Come dressed in your best black-tie but put it in like 2060,” Ross says. “One thing about Juneteenth is acknowledging the past to look forward. So we kind of went with a sankofa concept.”
2021 performer Dame Mufasa (Photo: Courtesy TONE)
The gala will feature a keynote speech by artist and TONE board member Derek Fordjour, in addition to a reading by Afrofuturist author Sheree Renée Thomas. Chef Eli Townsend of Sage will cater, and an after-party on the Mississippi Queen Riverboat III will follow.Tickets have been sold out, but if you couldn’t get your hands on a gala or after-party ticket, worry not: The second annual Juneteenth Family Reunion Festival is free and open to the public.
In lieu of a gala in 2021, TONE threw its first festival on the 10 acres surrounding the Orange Mound Tower, the site of the community-focused development project led by TONE founder Victoria Jones and Unapologetic founder James Dukes, aka IMAKEMADBEATS. “We knew we had to do something outside and that was Covid-safe,” Ross says. “We started to think about the fact that a lot of us — even just staff — hadn’t seen each other in so long. We hadn’t seen each other in over a year. And we were like, ‘This is about to be a family reunion.’”
And the family-reunion theme stuck. “It was a very beautiful experience,” they say. “It’s very important to do this celebration in the first Black neighborhood in this country. Just to do it on those grounds is always a special moment when we think about it.”
This year’s festival will include food trucks, vendors, games, and live music. The packed set list, headlined by rapper and Memphis native Duke Deuce, includes the Memphis Youth Arts Initiative Drumline, Mante Carlo, Bodywerk, Talibah Safiya, Texas Warehouse, Hitkidd, and Lukah. For more information, visit tonememphis.org and keep up with TONE’s socials, @tonememphis901 on Facebook and @tonememphis on Instagram.
Juneteenth Family Reunion Festival, Orange Mound Tower, Sunday, June 19th, 5 p.m.-11 p.m., Free.
The East End Skating Center is a Memphis cultural landmark, host to countless kids birthday parties and teenage flirtation. “I’ll be there on the weekend,” sings PreauXX over Aaron James’ ethereal guitar in “Eastend.”
The video was co-directed by Unapologetic Visual’s Cat Patton, Gabrielle Duffie, and 35 Miles, who handled the camera and editing. Glide on with the Luxurious One on a dream date in roller boogie heaven.
If you’d like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.
I MAKEMADBEATS, aka James Dukes, the founder and original producer at the UNAPOLOGETIC collective and label, recalls growing up with his father in Orange Mound, working on a barely functioning computer. “He had no idea what I was talking about,” the son remembers today, “but I got him to say something into the pencil-sized microphone. I just wanted to show him I could sample his voice. And he said, ‘Voulez-vous coucher avec moi,’ from that song. Then I made a beat out of it and he was like, ‘What?’ He couldn’t believe I could do that.”
Many still can’t believe the sounds that same knob-twiddler and composer is capable of today. And yet, aside from a 2011 album and a 2017 EP, most of the beats he’s known for are for other performers on the UNAPOLOGETIC roster. Lately, that’s changed. Starting last November, MAD, as he’s known, released MAD Songs, Vol. 1, the first of five releases that he’s personally sculpted to tell his story. Volume 2 is due out in early April, with three more after that slated for later in the year.
“When I’m done dropping all of one through five, it’ll just feel like one long album,” says the producer. “It’s really the story of me that I’ve never told, historically, because I’m usually busy producing other people. But there’s a lot that happens in the world of James, in the world of IMAKEMADBEATS, in the world of dad, and in the world of being a husband, that I’ve never explored musically. And that’s what these tell the story of. When it’s all said and done, MAD Songs Vol. 1-5 will really be MAD Songs, the album.”
If you know Vol. 1 already (one of the Flyer’s top 10 albums of last year), you’ll note that it has plenty of featured artists. Indeed, MAD himself is still behind the scenes, as his favorite singers and rappers step up to the mic. The difference? He’s crafting the narratives with them, in pursuit of his vision.
“There were times where I wrote a hook or suggested certain lyrics, but on a whole, it was more of an emotional bed that I created. Like ‘Depression And Redemption’ [on Vol. 1], was a group collaboration between me, Idaly, Idi, and Teco. I wasn’t really trying to control the words of the song so much as just tailoring a song that felt like what I went through. With ‘What I Need’ by PreauXX — well, PreauXX, that’s my brother. What he’s talking about are things we’re both going through. Basically, I would say, ‘Talk about this your way, as long as it fits under the umbrella of this general emotion that I need to be a part of this story.’”
Make no mistake, MAD needed to tell this story. It took on a new urgency around the time the pandemic started, but it wasn’t Covid: He had other crippling health issues. “I was going through some health things,” he says. “I had the feeling of being in a choke hold by my own illness and by the pandemic, and that was pushing me into a dark, dark tunnel about myself. ‘Born Again’ [from Vol. 1] is probably the song that set all of this off. My best friend, the best man at my wedding, the number one person I’ve ever made music with, a guy named MidaZ the Beast, had just been diagnosed with stage 3 lymphoma. For us to both be facing life-threatening illnesses at the same time didn’t feel like a coincidence.
“In the midst of all that, I found this song we made in 2014 called ‘Born Again,’ where MidaZ raps about diseases and plagues and how he can remove cancer by being born again. Not in the religious sense. It really is about being forced into something new, adapting, and that being okay. I took that as a sign: ‘You’ve got to put this song out.’”
MAD’s even recruited his father again, for a Vol. 2 track about parents teaching their kids about violence. “He came to my new studio Downtown to record it. It was beautiful, knowing that the very first recording he ever did for me was on that broken down computer, and now he’s in my studio.”
