One-Handed Music, 2014
Just vibing. That’s how Mo Kolours rolled on this album. Chilling in his spot in London. Front room full of like-minded fam, chatting about tunes, pulling out dusty records.
He’d chop ill beats and hum melodies, and if their heads started nodding, he’d take that one over the line. Adding his vocals and percussion, or sounds from GarageBand.
Inspired by beat-diggers and sample-flippers from across the pond like Dilla and Madlib, he’d whip up his own take on that deep vinyl crate alchemy, employing his gift for spotting a loop’s potential and innate sense of rhythm, in order to lace it with the perfect drum swagger.
It never felt like work. Writer’s block was a problem for the next man. He’d turn out tens of these jazzy, dubby, percussion-blessed boom-bap grooves a day. Stocking folders on his computer with hundreds per month, until it came time to sift through them, pick the winners, and add his vocals and extra musical flourishes for this self-titled gem of an album.
The resulting, spontaneous soundcraft that runs through it – part instinctual sample collage, part deliberate tone texturing – drew heavily from a shelf’s worth of musical influences and genres, from all corners of the globe.
There are touches of Detroit in the mix, with house and hip-hop heads both getting a nod in his work, as well as Brazilian rhythms, afro percussion, raps, spoken word, and influences from either side of his Anglo-Mauritian heritage.
In other hands, it could have ended up an album of halffinished sketches, pulled from unfocused sessions on-the-fly. But, like an artist who paints first, thinks last, each loop retains the spark that made it so special in the moment it was first heard.
“You can work on something for too long,” says Mo Kolours. “If you put too much effort into it, if you feel like it’s something too important, if there’s too much gravity with it, it gets tiring. It gets worrying. It needs to be fun and fluid to feel right. And then that comes through in the music. It comes through in that fluidity.”
Track by track with Mo Kolours
Brixton House
“I just wanted to make some dance music. My first EPs were a bit slow and trip-hoppy. I’d started doing a few gigs and wanted people to dance.
“I used to think dance music was boring – just ‘bom bom bom’, you know? But, then I started to listen to some good stuff – Moodyman, Theo Parrish, some Detroit. And I thought I could do some Dilla-slanted drum stuff, with that housey feel. So, I sampled something beautiful.”
Little Brown Dog
“I sampled this amazing live record. It was a dope feeling. I was having a steel drum moment. It just felt nice and the track came really quick.
“I remember there was some people in the room as I was making it,
