Body Meπa – Prayer in Dub

To be released on LP, CD, and digitally on October 25th, 2024. LP available on clear or black vinyl from Hausu Mountain, and on metallic silver vinyl at stores only. CD packaged in a slim digipak. This is the catalog page with album information and artwork. To purchase, head to our Bandcamp page.

Body Meπa is the New York-based quartet of Greg Fox (drums), Sasha Frere-Jones (guitar), Melvin Gibbs (bass), and Grey McMurray (guitar). As luminaries in the intersecting traditions of improvised music, rock, jazz, fusion, and contemporary classical music, the four artists have each spent decades building diverse practices that extend beyond sound into multiple disciplines. Prayer in Dub, their second release on Hausu Mountain, follows the band’s 2020 album The Work Is Slow. While Body Meπa recorded much of Prayer in Dub within the same period that followed their formation and first LP’s creation in 2020-2021, the album presents a band whose collective intuition as instrumentalists and live-in-the-room songwriters has deepened with each take that they put to tape. Focused on textural and rhythmic detail, repetition and variation of central motifs, and slowly evolving sessions that find room for improvisation, the quartet hesitate to pin down their amorphous output any further than the broad scope of what they describe as “New York City body music.” Their work engages with the physicality of “rock band” performance while stretching that idiom to its breaking point, all while evoking the environment that brought it to life: the city of New York in all its multitudes, where all four band members grew up.

Prayer in Dub finds Body Meπa taking up new experiments with song structure and atmosphere. While The Work Is Slow presented a band geared towards lengthy sessions that regularly passed the ten minute mark, patiently riding out grooves and settling into trance-like passages of recursion, Prayer in Dub fans out into a wide menu of both longer and more concise pieces that suggest deliberate shifts in energy and emotional resonance. The album presents a thrilling contrast between storms of precise rhythmic interplay and slowly expanding fields of multi-guitar and bass texture, alternately pushing the narrative toward explosive peaks of intensity and dipping into ambient expanses. Contemplative guitar lines, both bone dry and effected into total abstraction, ripple together over dub-indebted rhythm section grooves before shifting the dial towards beatific twang. Knotty distorted solos surge out of the fray over networks of arpeggios and drum fills. To a greater extent than on their previous recordings, Body Meπa explores the potential of diverse mixing strategies and contrasting recording fidelities, reaching us in moments with the crystalline clarity of a meticulously captured rock ensemble and at other times crackling with the light fuzz and room tone artifacts of a more informal recording. 

On Prayer in Dub, Body Meπa pursues a strain of euphoria charged with elegiac grandeur and the looming potential to crumble at any moment under the psychic weight of confusion. It speaks to the band’s goals and general outlook that chaos never completely consumes their sessions. Even at their most overwhelming, they’re working through their art as a shared consciousness that desires order, that understands the visceral power of rhythm and harmony as uniting forces, that seeks to extract new feelings from the tradition of four people playing rock instruments in a room together. The band channels the kinetic energy of a “supergroup” of veteran musicians into communal works that evolve beyond their creators’ extensive pedigrees into new forms both intimate in sentiment and majestic in scope.

It would require an entire additional bio to even scratch the surface of Greg Fox’s catalog as a drummer and synthesist/electronic producer, both solo and in innumerable bands and collaborations. His most recent solo LPs appeared on RVNG Intl., and the last few years have found him performing and recording with a wide roster of artists including Colin Stetson, Ka Baird, Marijuana Deathsquads, Kristin Hayter (Lingua Ignota), Marina Rosenfeld, Trevor Dunn and Sally Gates, John Colpitts, Jerusalem in My Heart, and Owen Pallett. Fox works as a music teacher and certified professional coach, channeling his own learning from mentors such as Milford Graves and Marvin “Bugalu” Smith into “help[ing] people find their rhythms, in behavior, mind, and spirit.” Fox runs Studio Te in Brooklyn, where he recorded Body Meπa’s music.

Sasha Frere-Jones founded the band Ui in the early 90s in New York. The band built a genre-shattering catalog that collided elements of funk, rock, dub, and electronic arrangement — including collaborations with Stereolab under the moniker Uilab. Ui performed their last show in 2022 at Public Records in New York after reuniting for concerts associated with the storied label Numero Group (who are currently reissuing the band’s entire catalog). Frere-Jones put out a split album with Loren Mazzacane Connors and has released solo music under the name Calvinist, working with engineer Ben Kane (D’Angelo). His work as a musician stands alongside an extensive career as a writer. His acclaimed memoir Earlier was published by Semiotext(e) in 2023, and his writing has appeared in Bookforum, The Nation, 4Columns, Metrograph, Parapraxis, New York Review of Architecture, and The New Yorker.

Grammy-nominated bassist Melvin Gibbs has a beyond-diverse background in jazz, rock, punk, and freeform experimentalism — anchored by mentors including Ornette Coleman and Gil Evans, encompassing work with Arto Lindsay, dead prez, Sonny Sharrock, and the Zig Zag Power Trio alongside Vernon Reid and Will Calhoun of the band Living Colour, stints in Defunkt and the Rollins Band, and collaborations including Power Tools alongside Bill Frisell and Ronald Shannon Jackson and the cooperative Harriet Tubman. Within the last few years, Gibbs released solo works on Editions Mego and Northern Spy, and performed in collaboration with Marisa Monte, Elliot Sharp and Don McKenzie (as Bootstrappers), Wadada Leo Smith, and with theoretical physicist Dr. Stephon Alexander as God Particle. He is currently writing a book entitled The Science of Black Music that will be published by Basic Books.

A fixture of the intertwined experimental scenes of New York City, Grey McMurray has worked with artists including Gil-Scott Heron, Meshell Ndegeocello, Tyondai Braxton, Alarm Will Sound, Du Yun, Beth Orton, Colin Stetson, Sam Amidon, Ali Sethi, John Cale, Laraaji, and Sō Percussion, with whom he composed a full-length album in 2012. He released his first solo record, Stay Up, on Shahzad Ismaily’s Figureight Records in 2019 and will be releasing a solo EP in fall 2024. McMurray’s ever-expanding practice has recently included performances at Coachella with Ali Sethi, at Carnegie Hall in various contexts, and in John Cale’s ensemble on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon. He recently produced Caleb Burhans’s acclaimed Past Lives album and co-produced Slowspin’s Talisman album. His collaborative trio Student Body with Caroline Davis and Qasim Naqvi will release their first album in the fall of 2024.

Prayer In Dub was produced and mixed by Matt Mehlan. Mehlan runs the mixing / mastering / audiovisual production suite STUUDIO, makes music as Skeletons, and runs the label Shinkoyo / Artist Pool. He has mixed and/or mastered releases by artists including Anthony Braxton, Yusef Lateef, Joe McPhee, and Zeena Parkins. He teaches at The Eugene Lang College at New School and has taught at School of the Art Institute of Chicago.