Inkswel & The Snaglepuss: Chasing Infinity

- There’s something very inviting about Inkswel. It could be his commitment to just making music: lots of music, as much music as possible. It could be the beguiling mix of styles he works in: starting from hip hop and house which flow languidly into each other before they seduce every other style that happens to be in the room -jazz, soul, funk, disco- into having some kind of groovy orgy. It could be his charismatic, spiritually charged way of expressing himself. Just listen to this little gem he quipped out while he was chatting to Pilerats’ Will Backler a couple of months ago: “Collaboration is all there is. Even when we work as solo producers or musicians it is still a collaboration, a collaboration with our instruments, our minds, our influences and the divine”. Oh and that’s the other thing: he just wants to make music with everyone and does, all the time.

That’s Inkswel, his new album Chasing Infinity, oh, and the weird ol’ concept band The Snaglepuss he dreamed up for this outing - all of it in a fairly crowded nutshell. The producer, originally from Adelaide and, during our locked down times, Adelaide-based again, has been dropping regular solo records since 2016 and they are always stuffed, almost absurdly so, with a star-studded lineup of guests.

To understand why this is, I think you have to go back to those South Australian origins. Inkswel, once just the humble Jules Habib, started out as a b-boy, of all things, but, as I hear it, he got bored with the gatekeeping and the scene’s obsession with a very limited palette of beats. In a process of discovery, he started flirting with funk, soul and disco and I’m not quite sure of the timeline, but I think it was when he started messing around with his own house productions that he took off, literally, overseas. It’s easier to list the places he hasn’t been in Europe and everywhere he’s gone he bangs out a beat or two and seemingly always does it with some new friend that he’s made. I could bore you with a very long list of artists and labels he’s friends with, but it’s not that hard to discover for yourself. Inkswel has, for instance, helpfully gathered about a decade’s worth of material on his Bandcamp page, so, please enjoy.

Even by the standards of Inkswel’s own releases, Chasing Infinity is a gala event, featuring a slew of very well-known and pleasantly old-school names, including his personal hero Talib Kweli, Steve Spacek, (Georgia Anne Muldrow’s regular collaborator) Dudley Perkins, Australians including Kylie Auldist, N’fa Jones and Elf Tranzsporter and finally, even travelling from beyond the grave to be here, dub legend Lee Scratch Perry.

Every bit of Inkswel I’ve listened to has a conscious vibe running through it and CI is no exception. It’s especially obvious in the early cuts and the contributions by Kweli and Perkins. Perkins for instance raps out a whole manifesto: “It’s a war between rich and poor / And we the people won’t stand for more.” It’s very laudable but I’m not always sure it matches the spiritual feel of the record that Inkswel is trying for. I mean, it’s weird to say that, because it’s difficult to think of a producer more sensitive to the needs of a vocalist. Even while he’s making whatever crazy clever fusion he’s up to, Inkswel, a true gentleman, never steals the limelight when it’s on someone else. Still, I feel like the soul of the record is more cosmic than militant, see for evidence the collaboration with Oliver Night on the title track. A blend of galactic awe and the love that can only be found on the dancefloor, it’s a beautiful vision, replete with a quote from the greatest cosmic ambassador, Sun Ra. In that spirit there’s a lot to like and tons to discover across this record but occasionally it clicks into something transcendent. One of my favourites is Inkswel’s euphoric meeting with Kylie Auldist and N’fa Jones in delicious disco on New Day.

Though he’s such an operator, a prolific producer and networker, I don’t actually know how well Inkswel is known in his homeland. The grand occasion that is Chasing Infinity is a good time to get on board. Not that there won’t be other opportunities: in the absence of clubs to DJ in, Inkswel appears to have gone into production overdrive. Take it from the horse’s mouth: “After this Snaglepuss album I have done some production work for Erin Buku's EP and a few other random projects. But I have also just finished an album with my dear friend and longtime collaborator Colonel Red as 'Holders of The Sun' which will drop later in the year on German label Compost Records with a very special remix. Beyond that there is lots more music from me this year and in the future, I'm just warming up.” Well, wow and he’s still kinda self-effacing as usual. Wherever you want to begin in his catalogue I can guarantee you’ll find an all-encompassingly warm and effusively generous sound that is unmistakably Inkswel.

- Chris Cobcroft.