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Madvillain was a collaboration between
New York-based rapper Daniel "MF Doom" Dumile
(ex-KMD)
and Los Angeles-based producer Otis "Madlib" Jackson (the son of a bluesman
and a folksinger, and the nephew of jazz trumpeter Jon Faddis), who had
already experimented with the collage technique
as the one-man band Yesterday's New Quintet (fictitiously described as
a "quintet") on Angels Without Edges (Stones Throw, 2001), building
songs (mostly smooth soul-jazz-funk instrumental ballads) out of microscopic fragments of keyboards, guitar, sax, vibraphone, drums and bass (not samples, but his own creations).
Their collaboration yielded one of the most publicized albums in the history of
hip-hop music,
Madvillainy (Stones Throw, 2004),
and its companion Madvillainy Instrumentals (2004).
While every magazine bragged about it, very few reviews could explain
what the excitement was all about. Madlib's sophisticated beat-art and
orchestration made it an impressive tour de force of production techniques,
but it was a far cry from the purported masterpiece of hip-hop.
Fragmented into 22 brief vignettes,
it was both a stylistic phantasmagoria and a cartoonish concept album.
Madlib's solo career, mostly obsessed with the legacy of jazz, had been fairly intense, comprising:
Lootpack's Soundpieces: Tha Antidote (1999) and its companion Soundpieces: Da Instrumentals (1999),
Quasimoto's The Unseen (2000), possibly his artistic zenith, and its companion The Unseen Instrumentals (2000),
Yesterdays New Quintet's Angles Without Edges (2001), a close second,
the disappointing Jaylib's Champion Sound (2003) and its companion Champion Sound Instrumentals (2003), a collaboration with J Dilla that was
reissed as the double-CD Champion Sound Reissue (Stones Throw, 2007),
Sound Directions' The Funky Side Of Life (Stones Throw, 2005), a
live band devoted to early 1970s funk and soul covers,
and Madlib's personal revision of the Blue Note catalog, Shades of Blue (2003).
Quasimoto was resurrected for The Further Adventures of Lord Quas (Stones Throw, 2005), another demented collage of genres and another cartoonish saga.
London-born rapper Daniel Dumile started out as Zev Love, the mastermind of
KMD, whose Mr Hood (1991) and Bl_ck B_st_rds (1993),
released only in 2000, were militant Islamic pamphlets.
After a long hiatus, Dumile assumed two new personas that released
MF Doom's Operation: Doomsday (1999) and the mediocre
MM_ Food (2004),
as well as
Viktor Vaughan's Vaudeville Villain (2003) and Venomous Villain (2004).
MF Doom lent his rapping skills to Dangerdoom's The Mouse And The Mask (2005), a collaboration with producer Brian "Danger Mouse" Burton, better known for mixing together vocals and beats from Jay Z's Black Album snippets from the Beatles' White Album to create his Grey Album (2004).
Madlib's The Beat Konducta Vol. 1-2 (Stones Throw, 2006) contains 35 hip-hop instrumental audio collages crafted with turntables, samplers and drum machines. Beat Konducta Vol. 3-4 (Stones Throw, 2007) targeted
Bollywood film music.
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