THE OSMANITY SESSION
A conversation with Balkan Bump
In late 2020 producer Will Magid, known to the music world as Balkan Bump, quietly released Osmanity, his full-length debut under the moniker. It's a wildly fun and ambitious record that really sounds like nothing else out in the musical ether. It's an album with deep grooves and big musical ideas, clearly crafted by someone with a deep well of skill to draw from and, perhaps more important, a more than palpable LOVE for music. “The title track 'Osmanity', me and my buddy Greg who co-wrote it, did the basic framework of it about 4 years ago. The CloZee track came out about a year and a half ago. Basically, I just started working on music and at some point realized, 'Hey wait, these songs fit together. I could put out an EP but I have more than four or five songs,'” says Balkan Bump describing the genesis of Osmanity to me over the phone from his home in Oakland. “Deciding to make an album at that point guided the rest of the writing and production process. It gave me a framework, 'Okay, I'm going to make this record. It's going to largely incorporate sounds from the Ottoman Empire, but of course with hip-hop and electronic and some jazz.' That decision gave me the context to get the album to another level as far as the cohesiveness of it. That's where the interludes come in and a few of the songs I wrote really late in the process to seal the package of the record together.”
While the album is a clear, cohesive statement with one person at the helm, Osmanity is at its core a deeply collaborative record, and for good reason. “I'm a pretty social person and I grew up playing in bands. So the idea of being a lone-wolf producer is not really my personality. For the most part I really thrive in environments of collaboration – out in the world at a festival, on tour or even just on the computer, on Soundcloud. In the case of Poldoore, we met on Soundcloud like 10 years ago and I think I've played trump on nearly half of his songs or something and he's done several remixes for me. CloZee, we toured together and vibed a lot together. We were talking about hip-hop [earlier], and I love the idea of group like the Wu-Tang Clan,” the excitement in Bump’s voice is more than palpable. “Okay, you have this group but you have all these individuals who have their own careers and collabroations. I look at the music world that way. All these artists are really connected, there are so many threads. The classic example of the scene I'm in is Big GriZmatik. Gramatik and GriZ and Big Gigantic are obviously separate artists, but can easily be one artist with different muscles being shown when different players step out front. I love that idea. It's not that I seek collaboration out or that it falls in my lap, it's more of just a natural continuum of the folklore nature of music.”
It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No! It’s Art Blakie! No! It’s GRAMATIK!
He expands…”In jazz, there were a lot band leaders, but they were all playing with each other. The roles of band leader vs band member would shift over the years. I liken Gramatik to Art Blakie in jazz. Art Blakie was a drummer. Throughout his career almost all the musicians he played with initially went on to lead their own bands. Gramatik is like that, he finds talent and amplifies their voice a little bit. Then those people kind of go off on their own and occasionally come back to collaborate with him. It's an exciting thing to talk about it. I think that there's this idea in electronic music that you have these geniuses with these secrets, and there are geniuses out there – like Dennis (Gramatik) is definitely a genius producer – but people don't know, the horns from Lettuce are on a ton of Gramatik records, and Adam Deitch (Drummer of Lettuce) met Dennis through Pretty Lights. Everything is so connected and everyone is trying to feel like they're part of that fabric.” We have veered far off course, but if this is where the detours lead, we’re doing good. But back to Osmanity.
The album is full of big collaborations, like the surreally thumping “Varshaver,” credited with untouchable bass maestro CloZee. Like most of the songs on the album “Varshaver” has a big story behind it. “Years before CloZee and I worked on that song together – There's this band in Oakland where I live called MWE. They play this very slowly, dirgy Turkish-style music with two clarinets and a big marching drum. They took – Well, I'm just going to give you all my secrets in this interview – they took this ancient klezmer melody, which is in public domain because it's a really old melody – it was originally played much faster in a traditional klezmer kind of way, but they slowed it down and put this Turkish groove on it. I jammed with that band a lot and I asked them, 'Hey, would you be okay if I did an electronic version of this song?' They were really into it. Meanwhile CloZee and I were talking and she sent me a beat that just happened to be the exact key and tempo of this old klezmer song. I started building it – Morgan Nielsen who plays clarinet with me and is also in MWE she put the clarinet on that track. Patty Raven who also plays with MWE plays sax on the track. CloZee did all the chops and percussion, those orchestral layers on it and it's her kick on it.” Music will always be at its heart a community-based practice and not just Osmanity but all of Balkan Bump's output embodies that collaborative, communal spirit.
Elsewhere on the album, the rich, earthy, hard-hitting “Nomade Slang,” was born out of both collaboration and annoying music-industry standards. Well, the voluntary and very courteous adherence to such standards, anyways. The saga behind the behemoth track starts like any other tale of collaboration and creation. “one of my favourite clarinetists in the world, Ismael Lumanovski, who is credited as a feature on that song, was playing in San Fransisco with a brass band that I was in, 15 piece Brass Band called Inspector Gadje, Ismael was a special guest with that band and right before a set I asked him 'Do you wanna come by the studio and jam over a few beats I'm making?' He laid down some beautiful clarinet that is in not only in the breakdown in that song but also the interlude right before it on the album, “Serpent Taksim.” And it was awesome but then I was left all these random clarinet parts, so I had to take what he used and make some new melodies.” See, we're off to smooth musical sailing, right?
“Meanwhile I was listening a lot to a Lebanese-French trumpet player named Ibrahim Maalouf and he had this song called “Nomad Slang” that had a beautiful melody. So while the beat and like 75% of that song is my original production, the melody is a cover of this Ibrahim Maalouf track. I decided, 'He's a legend, a hero of mine, I'm just gonna actually call him.' What a lot of people do is they'll borrow melodies and call it their own song – I hate to say it but it's very common in electronic music,” the seriousness in Bump’s voice becomes more evident. “I have so much respect for this player, that I'm going to call it a cover even though I wrote 75-80% of the song because there's a permanent part of the song that's an adaptation of his melody…You can publish this because I'm not stoked about this. I'm not even sure if he heard it. His label was being really...I could have easily not told them and just it out and never had any issues. But we were trying to do it right, like I said, I wrote a large percentage of the song we were trying to negotiate and give him 25, 30% or whatever, and the label was like, “No, we want 100% of the song.” It's difficult now for me because he's one of my favourite trumpet players in the world but it left a really bitter taste in my mouth. I was trying to do right by him. I don't think it's him, I think it's his team.”
Strange combativeness from a legend aside, the album is a testament to both Balkan Bump's immense talents and passion and to the way community helps build art and vice versa. The comfort and beauty of the collaborative feel of Osmanity is a welcome tone in the world of west coast electronic music and really brings an extra layer to an already fantastic album, brimming with ideas and electricity. Also the album just kicks serious ass as someone who likes shit that makes you dance. If you haven't put Osmanity on your headphones or your speakers yet...Why? Go fix that. Get your life in order.
Check out 5 Questions with Rags #79 featuring the man himself, Balkan Bump.