House and politics, and indeed music in general, are a funny mix. For every Bob Dylan you have a Bono, and for every Big Strick you have a Sascha Dive. We’ll leave Dive’s ill-advised Black Panther references for now, but the cousin of Omar-S’s “A Walk Down Linwood” powerfully proved politics in house doesn’t end with Moodymann or MLK speeches laid over “Can You Feel It?”. All this is by way of introduction to the A2 on I.F.M.’s “Back In The Days” EP.
Marcello Napoletano
Marcello Napoletano, A Prescription Of Love
August 10, 2009 – 10:01 PM
The catalog of Mathematics Recordings could be reductively portrayed as doggedly flying the colors for a very particular template of analog house sounds while, ideally, asserting new and distinctive individual artistic visions. A mix of seminal pioneers still plugging away and fresh faces mining similar territory, this Jamal Moss-operated label has always, at the very least, been one worth keeping tabs on. New recruit Marcello Napoletano’s background includes some left-field jazz piano, but his new record’s title hints at a far more apparent antecedent: vintage Chicago house from the likes of Ron Trent et al. However, Napoletano’s sound has a raw, unprocessed quality that owes as much to the likes of Adonis or Steve Poindexter (two of the aforementioned pioneers on the Mathematics roster).