Ribongia: It Began

- Sydney producer Antonio Rosselli is a creative talent in a constant state of flux. Since I first ran across him just a few years ago, even his stage name has changed: the slightly presumptuous Master Of Ribongia has had its barrels sawed-off to bring you the business-like Ribongia. If you missed his previous exciting episodes, Rosselli messed around with ambient and downtempo sounds before his full-length, I Bit Her, in 2011 delivered...everything? The maximalism of that release is one of the few connections you can easily make between it and this fresh leaf he’s turning over on brand new EP It Began. Back then it was not only in your face but just like a bowl of genre soup being spilled right into your ears. Jazzy downtempo mixed with glitch, mixed with wonky, mixed with electro-funk, mixed with 8-bit, mixed with idm, mixed with bass music and all at a bracing pace; it was kind of exhausting. That mad inventiveness had some stylistic co-travellers at the time: like the electro-funk nuttiness of Jamie Lidell or the fusion dance beats of Slugabed, although Rosselli may well have outpaced them in some of the innovative genre connections he was making and, certainly, his results were at least as good as his bigger name, British counterparts. The game has moved on since then and, Rosselli too has been finding fresh inspiration and -as usual- from a variety of sources. The first two cuts off his new EP are enormous, hypercolour bangers. Slave Trade is loaded down with African language cut-ups, air-raid sirens, speeding, syncopated beats and thundering bass. It has the same sort of richly saturating energy and colourful melody that made Hermitude’s Hyperparadise one of the best records of its year. Genre-wise, it takes some though not all of its moves from the footwork and juke house sounds that are still sitting at the edge of popular consciousness. He gives those often harshly minimalist and repetitive styles some real flesh for their bones, especially with all those tribal affectations. Exactly the same thing can be said of Save The Children, which is just as likeable, even with that tasteless ‘oriental’ melody running through, borrowed from the Hudson Mohawke book of silliness. There’s no danger of repeating himself or getting boring: the house synthesisers belted on to the African folk singing and that bass: oh that’s crazy. With two advances like that, it’d be a wonder if there was anything left for the rest of the EP. Title track It Began is a team-up with like-minded producer, Clap! Clap! Interestingly, both he and Rosselli are originally from Italy (I think Clap! Clap! is based in the UK now?) and have a shared fascination for the sounds of the African continent. The track is -once again- a happily insane collision of US beats and African samples, this time given a narrative by a collage of US b-movie narrators, informing the listener with the greatest gravitas: “It began...in Africa.” I discovered, just when I got the EP, that Skrillex’s free label experiment, Nest HQ was taking an interest in the record. It really flipped my perspective, made me wonder if this was too party, somehow less than it seemed? Is it intellectually bankrupt aural tourism that sacrifices somebody else’s cultural history for a couple of cheap dancefloor thrills? Listening closely I realised that’s hardly fair: like the best stuff on OWSLA Ribongia is party, but pretty smart as well. Even through the bass wubbs and gunshot samples loading down a track like Stomp, the wild syncopation is twice as interesting as any beat-gumbo-lite you might hear being slopped out on Mad Decent this week. Even the quasi-trap of second Clap! Clap! collaboration Gazela fails in any way to get me down. I don’t know how many kids Nest HQ is beaming out to, but I’m hoping that it gives Antonio Rosselli the kind of attention he really deserves. Ribongia continues to be a fantastic project, more ‘next’, more interesting and more downright danceable than just about anything packing them in their sweaty masses into stadiums, across Australia, right now. - Chris Cobcroft.