January’s first half has roused plenty of gratitude among the team back here. We’re grateful for each other, for the result of our collective input. Point is, collabs can be pretty magical! That much is evident with us, but also with the acts we cover. One category of such cases are the joint multi-track musical projects that were released last year. Foremost on our minds is last April’s 3-track EP release “Gucci 2 Piece” by That Malcolm Guy & Denesi.
And a recent December EP drop by Rwandan rapper-producer pair Derek Sano & Dr Nganji.
There’s a lot of baked-in charm within the concept of a joint EP or album. For one, there’s the fun of artistically navigating the expectations of combined fandoms, double momentum in publicity, tweaking ideas in pursuit of complementarity and so on. And yet if one’s to let their imagination run wild, there’s even more innovative ways for artists to collaborate around musical projects. Hear us out:
On a typical joint project, two or more artists collab to bring loosely similar concepts to life in one album. But what if the concept were inverted? What if two albums were crafted to contain exactly the same singular concept? By multiple artists, still. In fact the template bears so many possibilities. It could be a joint release of varying sonic interpretations of the same material by two or more artists. It’d really make it adventurous in terms of rollout & further audience acquisition. Alternatively, one artist’s release could be a prologue or epilogue to the other’s. The synergies could even be styled in terms of an alternating tracklist; where, say, track-one of preceding album gels into the corresponding track-one of the second artist’s album, both by lyrical/conceptual continuity and even in the titling. In fact, it could be indicated to the listeners in the album notes to alternate their listening pattern for a fuller experience. We’re afraid we’re nerding out a bit too much with this😂… but hey, it’s part of why we got into it all!
It’s our (admittedly geeky) hope that artists expand the possibilities in their minds around collabs, specifically over multi-track projects, mainly because they’re a more elastic template for rethinking synergies and breaking grounds in a way that defines entire scenes. Give these possibilities a think, y’all!
