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Transmissions From Total Refreshment Centre dropped Friday (February 17), the first official compilation documenting the extended community surrounding its eponymous London venue. It’s a snapshot of a thriving local scene combining elements of hip-hop, jazz, dub, soul, funk, UK drill, and other radical Black forms of expression. So it’s fitting that the record’s closing track is “Black,” a slick meditation on everything the word means.
“Category black cover / I portray that Black brother / Son of a Black father and a Black mother / From the city where we choke / On that black smoke smother,” Brother Portrait raps over crackling drums, a resonant walking bass line, and splashes of color provided by a warped saxophone, all courtesy of the Neue Grafik and his ensemble. The interplay between the rapped vocal and progressive jazz production recalls early experiments from three decades ago, when Guru’s Jazzmatazz (which used live instrumentation) and Digable Planets’ Reachin’ (which used samples) dropped the same year.
Released in collaboration with Blue Note Records, Transmissions From Total Refreshment Centre is a demonstration of fusion in its most classic sense, a testament to the interconnectivity of Black music, and a reminder of how insufficient the genre signifiers we use are at capturing its full spectrum.
Watch the video for “Black” above and stream Transmissions From Total Refreshment Centre below.