FourOneOne and Sound+Science celebrate composer, producer, writer and bassist Melvin Gibbs’ new album, the avant-jazz odyssey and homage to electric-era Miles, Amasia: Anamibia Sessions 2 (Hausu Mountain, 2025). Join Gibbs, writer Sheree Renée Thomas, and turntablist, and author Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky, for a listening party and conversation exploring the conceptual and empirical borderlands of  Afrocentric transhumanism and the voodoo/hoodoo continuum within "Great Black Music: Ancient to the Future" in a time dulled by the statistical hegemony of AI.

Amasia: Anamibia Sessions 2 finds Gibbs operating masterfully within the roles of composer, arranger, collagist, performer and bandleader, merging more than two decades of recordings into a thrilling, large-scale assemblage. 

Amasia flows—like its predecessor, Anamibia Sessions 1: The Wave (Editions Mego, 2022)—from an instigating spark provided by Gibbs' friend of many decades, the American video artist and cinematographer Arthur Jafa, who proposed that a group of musicians play along to Miles Davis' Bitches Brew, then make a record from the results. For Amasia: Anamibia Sessions 2, Gibbs drew further inspiration from Teo Macero and Miles Davis' ingenious production and editing on albums like Bitches Brew, with the album Agharta (released 50 years ago this year) serving as the project's North Star. "I've always heard Miles's '70s music as a form of dub music and related his '70s output to remix culture as much as I relate it to jazz," Gibbs writes. Amasia finds Gibbs with his aperture widened to the max, re-contextualizing recordings of the inimitable guitarist Pete Cosey (1943–2012), who recorded his parts in 2006, ripping his signature distorted leads alongside the organ and Wurlitzer of keyboard pillar John Medeski, also recorded in 2006, over a drum performance by the omnivorous Greg Fox (Gibbs's current bandmate in Body Meπa), recorded in 2024. 

Unifying these temporally transplanted and re-layered sessions are Gibbs' production, editing, drum programming—which evokes present-day hip hop production and the more frenetic strains of contemporary electronic dance music—and horizon-seeking vision. Writes Gibbs: "Amasia isn't just a manifestation of my view of what an intergenerational embrace of the concept of Great Black Music should sound like. The work bridges the gap between alive and unalive in a Voodoo/Hoodoo kind of way that you could look at as recentering the ancestral Afrocentric view of transhumanism in this moment where we’re grappling with AI and the Silicon Valley / tech bro iteration of transhumanism…Pete Cosey, keyboard player Onaje Allan Gumbs, and multi-instrumentalist Casey Benjamin [who all play on the album]...are gone, but their vibration contributes an energy to this album that goes beyond […] invoking a bygone musical era. On this record, their performances get inserted into the current musical zeitgeist, and what they've done maintains its dialogue with Black cultural evolution."

Bios:

The Grammy-nominated composer, producer, bassist and writer-thinker Melvin Gibbs’ multifarious investigations in sound encompass work with Arto Lindsay, dead prez, Sonny Sharrock, stints in Defunkt and the Rollins Band, and collaborations in ensembles including Power Tools alongside Bill Frisell and Ronald Shannon Jackson, and the raucous, liberatory collective Harriet Tubman. In the last few years alone, Gibbs has released solo works on Editions Mego and Northern Spy, and performed in collaboration with Marshall Allen, Elliot Sharp, Don McKenzie (as Bootstrappers), Wadada Leo Smith, and with theoretical physicist Dr. Stephon Alexander (as God Particle). He recently finished his first book, titled How Black Music Took Over The World, which will be published by Basic Books in 2026. 

Sheree Renée Thomas is an award-winning and widely-anthologized fiction writer, poet, and editor. Her work is inspired by myth and folklore, natural science and Mississippi Delta conjure. Among many other projects, Sheree is the author of Nine Bar Blues: Stories from an Ancient Future (Third Man Books, 2020) and the Marvel novel adaptation of the legendary comic Black Panther: Panther's Rage (Titan Books, October 2022). 

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky is a turntablist, record producer, philosopher, author, and electronic hip hop musician. His books include the award-winning Rhythm Science, published by MIT Press in 2004, and the forthcoming Digital Fiction, for Duke University Press, about the impact of algorithms on how we think of storytelling.

Sound+Science is an innovative after-school program, research lab, and community in NYC for high school students interested in exploring the unique and deep connection between music, science, and technology. Through a unique curriculum, participants will explore modules like "The Hidden Codes in Electronic Music," "From Hip-Hop to AI," and "Music Improvisation and the "Evolution of the Mathematics of Computation Sound+Science," revealing the profound connections between music, technology, physics and mathematics.