Electronic music producer Four Tet and hip-hop producer Madlib are joining forces for a new collaborative album. Titled Sound Ancestors, it’s due out next month via Madlib Invazion.
The upcoming effort has been in the works “for the last few years,” according to a statement posted to Four Tet’s social media on Sunday. “[Madlib] is always making loads of music in all sorts of styles and I was listening to some of his new beats and studio sessions when I had the idea that it would be great to hear some of these ideas made into a Madlib solo album,” he noted.
Four Tet explained further how Sound Ancestors came together using “hundreds of pieces” of music,
“Not made into beats for vocalists to use but instead arranged into tracks that could all flow together in an album designed to be listened to start to finish. I put this concept to him when we were hanging out eating some nice food one day and we decided to work on this together with him sending me tracks, loops, ideas and experiments that I would arrange, edit, manipulate and combine. I was sent hundreds of pieces of music over a couple of years stretch and during that time I put together this album with all the parts that fitted with my vision.”
Editors’ Picks
The joint album is set to arrive sometime in January. As a preview, the two producers are sharing an ambient and soulful lead single called “Road of the Lonely Ones”. Hear that below.
For Madlib, Sound Ancestors follows Bandana, his stellar 2019 collaborative album with Freddie Gibbs. Over the last few decades, the California-born producer has also worked extensively with rap legends like MF DOOM and the late J Dilla.
For Tet, meanwhile, recently dropped a pair of joint songs with Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Burial. 2020 has also seen the release of his solo LP Sixteen Oceans and remixes of both Tame Impala (“Is It True”) and Caribou (“Never Come Back”).
