eMusic Review 0
San Francisco ethno-eclectico-electronica label Six Degrees turns ten years old this year, and I can't imagine any release marking the occasion better than my favorite new album, Dub Qawwali, a beautifully executed posthumous remixture of qawwali king Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan by the London producer Gaudi. Nusrat died in August 1997 just as Six Degrees founders Bob Duskis and Pat Berry were gearing up to blend the era's burgeoning electronic dance esthetic with regional sounds from around the globe.
"Wouldn't it be interesting if it wasn't two German guys using tiny little pygmy samples, like on the Deep Forest albums," Duskis recently recalled musing back then. "What if you instead had electronic producers in India blending the music of their homeland with electronic music and music from Africa and Brazil?"
Gaudi runs with that mandate on Dub Qawwali, adding flutes, strings and tablas to previously unreleased Nusrat vocal tracks from the '60s and '70s, folding them all together into a lilting, echoing sauce of warm analog Jamaican dub production techniques. Gaudi cuts to the melodic core of Nusrat's music, setting into relief blissful South Asian melodies that might otherwise have been overwhelmed by the intensity and passion of the live qawwali… read more »
