Dr. No’s Ethiopium

The younger brother of mercurial beat maestro Madlib, Oh No emerged from his sibling’s shadow in the mid-‘00s and began to develop his own distinctive style as a producer and MC. Oh No ventured into the world of instrumental albums with *Dr. No’s Oxperiment*, constructed solely from samples of obscure Middle Eastern psych and funk records from the ‘60s and ‘70s. 2009’s *Dr. No’s Ethiopium* is something of a sequel to *Oxperiment*. While *Oxperiment* looked to Turkish psychedelia and Lebanese folk-rock for source material, *Ethiopium* draws exclusively from the heady, intoxicating sounds of the Ethiopian jazz scene of the ‘60s and ‘70s. During this period, singers like Tilahun Gèssèssè and Mahmoud Ahmed fronted gifted instrumental combos whose music was a curious fusion of traditional Ethiopian melodies and American jazz and R&B. By cutting up samples of these records, Oh No has created a set of 36 brief but beguiling hip-hop instrumentals that partake of the same wobbly late-night atmosphere that illuminates the work of J. Dilla and Madlib.

Madlib's younger brother continues to develop his own recognizably consistent and characteristic style, here working with Ethiopian music of the 1960s and 70s.