Resonance Theory | 03

"The All Of Everything" - Sun Ra And His Intergalactic Infinity Arkestra 

"The Human Abstract" - David Axelrod

"Street Lullaby (Herberts Gutter Dub)" - Two Banks of Four

"High" - Little Dragon

"Masterpiece" - Sault

"Gymnopedie Piano 1 Interludes (OffBeatz Trip Grimy Delight)" - Erik Satie

"Huit Octobre 1971" - Cortex

"Portrait of Tracy" - Jaco Pastorius

"Can It All Be So Simple" - El Michels Affair

"Back to the Streets" - Guts

"Late Night Groove" - Mark Dorricott

"Pink Lilies" - Arovane

"Spores" - Fila Brazillia

"Strong Downward" - Baby Mammoth

"The All Of Everything" - Sun Ra And His Intergalactic Infinity Arkestra 

It all begins with Sun Ra. Our opening track “The All of Everything” comes fromThe Night of the Purple Moon, recorded in New York in 1970 at Variety Recording Studio with a stripped-down quartet built around electronic keyboards rather than the wider Arkestra. Ra plays Rock-Si-Chord and Minimoog, John Gilmore (usually heard on tenor) mostly sits at the drum kit on this session, and Danny Davis's flute carries the reflective center of "The All of Everything." Irwin Chusid's notes on the Bandcamp page point out that the album has the vague flavor of late-sixties psychedelia, with Ra apparently angling, for once, at something closer to an accessible pop record. The track found a wider audience through Gilles Peterson's 2015 Strut compilation To Those Of Earth... And Other Worlds, which gathered Ra's most approachable work for a new generation of converts.

David Axelrod — “The Human Abstract”

Axelrod's 1969 Capitol album Songs of Experience is the second installment of his trilogy of musical interpretations of William Blake. The record was made after the death of his son Scott, and it lands noticeably darker than its predecessor, framing mortality and spirituality through a full Los Angeles orchestra grounded by Wrecking Crew funk from Earl Palmer and Carol Kaye, with Don Randi conducting. In Sheep's Clothing singles out "The Human Abstract" as the cut, the same piano figure DJ Shadow lifted for "Midnight in a Perfect World" on Endtroducing..... Now-Again's definitive 2018 reissue, part of Eothen Alapatt's Capitol Trilogy program, was lacquered directly from Axelrod's original master tapes at Capitol by Ron McMaster.

Two Banks of Four — “Street Lullaby (Herberts Gutter Dub)”

Two Banks of Four are Demus (Dilip Harris) and Rob Gallagher of Galliano, working out of West London on records that, as their NTS bio puts it, came partly from walks around the capital recording trains, river police, and people shouting. "Street Lullaby" first appeared on their 2000 Sirkus debut City Watching and earned the group early support from Gilles Peterson and Jazzanova. Herbert's reworking, with vocals from Dani Siciliano, surfaced through a 2001 remix EP and was anchored on disc one of his 2002 Peacefrog set Secondhand Sounds: Herbert Remixes, reviewed by Resident Advisor when it landed. The version strips the original to vocal, piano, restrained strings, and Herbert's typical micro-house programming, and remains one of the more durable after-hours moments from that early-millennium UK scene.

Little Dragon — “High”

"High" arrived in February 2017 as the lead single from Season High, the Gothenburg quartet's fifth album and the first they made with a producer outside their own studio. Simian Mobile Disco's James Ford handled additional production and mixing. In a conversation with The FADER around the album's release, Yukimi Nagano talked about the discipline of pacing the work, of resisting the constant pressure for content, and of making music that resists apathy. The song followed the Grammy-nominated Nabuma Rubberband, and the Ossian Melin video, plus a later remix by Michael Uzowuru and Jeff Kleinman, gave the track a long second life on radio.

Sault — “Masterpiece”

"Masterpiece" sits near the middle of 5, the May 2019 debut from London collective SAULT, released on the Inflo-founded Forever Living Originals label without an artist photograph, an interview, a video, or a press cycle. Qobuz Magazine's later profile describes the track as beautiful, slow-burning neo-soul, part of an album where the strategy of withholding individual credits forced the music to travel on word of mouth. Inflo (Dean Josiah Cover) produces; Cleo Sol's voice is the one most listeners eventually identified inside the deliberately obscured constellation. The collective would not stage a public concert until late 2023.

Erik Satie — “Gymnopedie Piano 1 Interludes OffBeatz Trip Grimy Delight”

Beneath the unofficial 2014 SoundCloud rework lies one of the most influential melodies in modern Western music. Satie composed Trois Gymnopédies in early 1888 in a rented room near the Chat Noir cabaret in Montmartre, where he worked as a conductor, and the first Gymnopédie remains widely cited as a precursor to ambient music. Claude Debussy orchestrated the first and third in 1896, the only time he ever orchestrated another composer, and that gesture, rather than the salon publication, is what carried Satie into the broader public ear. The melody has since become extraordinarily portable. Janet Jackson's "Someone to Call My Lover" rebuilds the Gymnopédie in 4/4 over the chorus, paired with a sample from America's "Ventura Highway," a structural trick the Vevo Footnotes episode for the song walks through bar by bar.

Cortex — “Huit Octobre 1971”

Recorded in two days in July 1975 at Studio Damiens in Boulogne-Billancourt and released later that year on Disques Espérance, Troupeau Bleu was the debut by Alain Mion's French jazz-funk quintet, with Mireille Dalbray on vocals, Jean Grevet on bass, Alain Gandolfi on drums, and Alain Labib on alto saxophone. The track is named for Mion and Dalbray's wedding anniversary. Rolling Stone's 2022 deep-dive traces how the album sat largely overlooked until DJ Cam sampled the title track in 1997, after which Madlib looped "Huit Octobre 1971" for the Jaylib track "No Games" with J Dilla and again, most famously, on MF DOOM's "One Beer." Passion of the Weiss caught up with Mion ahead of the band's first U.S. tour, by which point WhoSampled had logged Cortex over 160 times across his catalog, all of it stemming from a record made for almost no money in two midsummer afternoons.

Jaco Pastorius — “Portrait of Tracy”

"Portrait of Tracy" is a solo bass piece played almost entirely in natural harmonics, named for Jaco's first wife Tracy Sexton and tucked at the end of side one on his 1976 Epic debut. Bobby Colomby of Blood, Sweat & Tears produced the album after seeing Pastorius play in Fort Lauderdale and signing him within a month. JazzFM has a fine essay on how the harmonics gave the bass a tone no one had heard before, and on why El-P later chopped it into Cannibal Ox's "Pigeons," with Chingy and Tyrese eventually sampling the same source for a Top 10 hit. Marcus Miller has written about hearing this piece as a kid in Brooklyn and being astonished that the music itself was as remarkable as the technique, that "once you get over being blown away by the fact that it's all performed on a bass, you listen to the music and that blows you away again."

El Michels Affair — “Can It All Be So Simple”

The track comes from Enter The 37th Chamber, released on Fat Beats in 2009, an album of analog reinterpretations of Wu-Tang material led by saxophonist-organist Leon Michels and engineer Jeff Silverman. Michels coined the phrase Cinematic Soul to describe the band's blend of vintage soundtrack mood, early reggae recording aesthetic, and the rawness of late-sixties rock, a sound he developed at Soul Fire Studios in Brooklyn alongside players from Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings, the Budos Band, and Antibalas. Their version of "Can It Be All So Simple" recasts RZA's source feeling without quoting it, drawing instead on the same well of Stax-era melodic phrasing. It plays now as a piece of New York retro-soul history.

Guts — “Back To The Streets”

Released on the limited Heavenly Sweetness edition Pura Vida Club 2 in 2016, "Back to the Streets" is by the French producer Fabrice Henri, who built his name in the nineties as Gutsy producing for Alliance Ethnik, Big Red, and Les Svinkels, and went solo in 2007 with Le Bienheureux. Pan-African Music's profile walks through the arc of his beat-digging years from his Ibiza studio. The track loops Rudy Norman's 1980 "Back to the Streets," a confirmed sample lineage, and signals Guts's shift toward writing for live musicians while keeping the digger's instinct for source material

Mark Dorricott — “Late Night Groove”

Dorricott is a Shrewsbury-based UK keyboardist, composer, and producer whose work, as his Bandcamp page describes it, ranges from jazz and Latin pieces to ambient piano, esoteric and cinematic in tone. "Late Night Groove" appeared on his self-released 2013 album Night Drive and resurfaced on the 2016 collection Afterhours. The Bandcamp model has been the entire point of the project from the start, an unmediated route to a downtempo, late-jazz audience that does not pass through a label.

Arovane — “Pink Lilies”

Released on City Centre Offices in 2004, Lilies was Berlin producer Uwe Zahn's last album as Arovane before a nine-year hiatus that ended only with Ve Palor in 2013. The record is a cinematic travelogue shaped by a trip to Tokyo, with field recordings of stations and street voices threaded through the breaks. The vocalist on "Pink Lilies" is kazumi, who, as Zahn told A Strangely Isolated Place in a 2013 interview, reached him cold from London and ended up flying to Berlin to record. The closer of the album was titled "Good Bye Forever."

Fila Brazillia — “Spores”

A Touch of Cloth was Fila Brazillia's seventh album and the first they self-released, in November 1999, after leaving Pork Recordings to launch their own Tritone imprint. Steve Cobby and David McSherry's longest interview from the period, originally written for the Big Issue in the North that October, captured them as the antithesis of nineties studio anonymity, talented players who wanted creative independence and disliked the music industry on principle. "Spores," the album's closing track, is one of their quieter ambient statements, a mood piece tucked at the end of an otherwise more uptempo record.

Baby Mammoth — “Strong Downward”

"Strong Downward" closes Baby Mammoth's 1999 album Swimming, released on Pork Recordings in Hull and credited to Mark Blissenden and Andrew Burdall, with Robin Marrs adding hand percussion under the credit Sheik. Pork was the regional anchor for a whole school of UK downtempo, where Cobby's Fila Brazillia and Dave Brennand's label work co-existed, and Baby Mammoth were the most prolific act on the roster, packing five LPs of blunted instrumental hip-hop into a four-year stretch from 1996 to 1999. Swimming leans on live percussion in a way the earlier records did not, and "Strong Downward" rides that out. An ideal closer for the evening.

Listen to: Resonance Theory | 01