No Slack by ML Wah & Herbcraft

The recordings on this split represent a 7-year thread woven between four of my musical aliases, gathered together on No Slack under the common inspiration of spiritual roots reggae and dub.

The Herbcraft side was recorded in 2011, initially home-dubbed as a private press cassette micro-run (of five) for that spring's merch table and vanished completely -- until Crash Symbols invited Herbcraft to contribute a track to a digital comp a few years down the line. A new edit of "Ababa" was mixed and released on Touched By an Angle in 2014, though a seed had been planted that encouraged further growth in this particular garden.

It was a long, four-year flowering, but while mixing new tracks for my ML Wah solo project this past spring I could sense the harvest approaching: here were two new rhythm-driven reggae and dancehall-influenced free guitar jams, offering a new lens for the same influences to shine through. I spun the masters of these new ML Wah cuts and queued up the Herbcraft tracks from 2011 to follow, and on that first listen it was clear these two halves should meet at the center.

It's a thrill to finally be able to share these fruits of the deepest roots, all the more special for being dressed and ushered into the world by the same folks that doula'ed "Ababa" all those years ago.

-Matt Lajoie

Ink drawings by Matt Lajoie
Art/Layout by Liz Pavlovic
lizpavlovic.com

Free Form Freakout, Favorite Tapes of 2018

"...super taut." -Tabs Out Podcast

"A hazy image of Augustus Pablo playing melodica channels straight to mind. This cassette titled No Slack is an extremely well curated assemblage of root doctor's medicines. A bag of four remedies, each with different healing properties." -Lost in a Sea of Sound

Tracklist

1.	ML Wah - Malawa Beat	8:28

2.	ML Wah - Juicy Fruit (Herbsman Dub)	5:09

3.	Herbcraft - Ababa	7:32

4.	Herbcraft - No Slack (General Vibe Dub)	8:18

Credits

released November 16, 2018

License

CC BY-NC 3.0. See the Creative Commons website for details.