Elijah Minnelli’s music is part of a larger structure that is never fully resolved: Breadminster. A fictional English small town with its own institutions, eras and crises. The Larder Era. The Avian Purge of 1915. The scandal surrounding Dr Khouldoux. Breadminster even has its own council, the Breadminster County Council – which, in »our« world, functions as Minnelli’s label. Within Breadminster, Minnelli himself holds the title of »Night Czar«: a salaried musician navigating the town’s archives through dub.
This act of world-building forces listeners to hear the music differently. Not simply as dub, folk or experiment, but as a critique of ordering systems such as genres, institutions and cultural administration. Minnelli overwrites the conventions by which music is usually categorised. Breadminster is not a gimmick but a refusal of clarity. It is the condition under which this music can exist in the first place.
»I value my own ignorance as a production technique.«
Elijah Minelli
How rigorously Minnelli maintains this world becomes clear in conversation as well. Asked how Breadminster came into being, he replies: »Just to ease any confusion, I imagine you are referring to the Breadminster County Council Music Initiative. This was founded in the early 1950s by Ezekiel Teets. The Teets family were wealthy ivory exporters and mostly used the initiative to boost piano sales in the Breadminster area.« At present, Minnelli adds, there is a dispute with Nestlé over the Breadminster trademark – which is why the town’s archives are currently being withheld from the public.
Dub Be Good to Me
The Guardian named Perpetual Musket (Fat Cat) one of the ten best folk albums of 2024. The new record goes even further. On Clams As A Main Meal, old folk songs are not merely dressed in dub clothing – Elijah Minnelli now invents the archival material itself.
On »Canaan Land«, the legendary Dennis Bovell sings over clattering, almost wilfully amateurish tambourine hits, clarinet, a hint of A Hawk and a Hacksaw, maybe Balkan – maybe just the idea of it. Dub rhythms hover above like a second temporal layer. This is not a reconstruction of old folk songs, but their reinvention in the present. Minnelli describes his approach succinctly: »I value my own ignorance as a production technique.«
His method is neither historical nor futuristic. Breadminster does not refer to a past that needs preserving, nor a future that must be reached. It exists outside of time. Or rather: within a form of time that cannot be thought linearly. Dub is not used here as a stylistic quotation but as a method of retelling history – or histories. »It is a practice and a process, something that is done to something.« For example: building new worlds.
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