With Ball & Socket, Elijah Minnelli has created a work that seems to bring the artist a little closer to himself. For one particular element moves decisively to the centre of his music here for the first time: the voice. It runs through all four tracks on the record, at one moment murmured and almost unintelligible, the next clear and tangible. Combined with the dub rhythms to which Minnelli also remains faithful on Ball & Socket, this gives rise to a music that carries something almost magical within it. The connection feels like a quiet prayer, a ritual, a small ceremony in sound. That is precisely where its particular strength lies.
Minnelli does not use dub arrangements simply as genre craft, but as an open framework within which different traditions can meet. Folk inflections encounter the production logic of Caribbean soundsystem culture and interweave into a sonic world of his own, calm and circular in motion. One track that immediately stands out is »Unkind«. For this piece, the London producer brings Kiki Hitomi on board. Together they create a sound full of groove, movement and rhythmic tension, unfolding slowly before building into a hypnotic dynamic.
Ball & Socket
