Ishmael Ensemble – Rituals album, track-by-track
The Bristol five piece dissect their latest
Ishmael Ensemble’s third album, Rituals, marks a major evolution for the Bristol-based group. Their fusion of live instrumentation and electronic elements extends far beyond the ‘UK jazz’ label their early work was classified under, adding spiritual jazz, dub, experimental and electronic styles and shaping powerful, swirling soundscapes from them.
“A truly boundary-pushing work of great ambition,” is what our reviewer reckoned. So we thought we’d invite the band to guide us through its tracklisting with their personal thoughts on each cut. Here’s what they said.
C’mon
C’mon was always going to be the opener, it was tense from the get go and I love the layering of the vocals. I was listening to lots of music with both male and female leads – like Pixies & Low, I love how neither voice takes centre stage & you can kind of hone in on either one you want
Blinded
This one came about super quickly, it’s a very Ishmael Ensemble sounding tune to me, maybe what we do best, tight tough drums that open up to a beautiful cacophony then bubble away into the ether. That’s become a bit of a blueprint on and off stage for us, but I guess if it ain’t broke – don’t try and fix it!
Dust
Dust was a first in many ways, I’m doing the lead vocals which was something I’ve wanted to do for a long time but needed to find the right tune for, it’s also the first track that seemed to capture the epicness and emotions I wanted for the record. It came about out of nowhere, I was working my day job at the time as an electrician and just had this chopped vocal loop going round and round in my head, I’ve got a voice note of me in the corner of a warehouse, pacing up and down laying out the drum beat, vocal chop and fractured melody that would later become the verse. This became a process I’d revisit throughout the album.
Cold Light
Working title “Enya Intro” (I became a born again Enya fan over lockdown), this one all came out in a flash, Mullins sent me the majority of the backing track and I just recorded the vocal right off the bat, the melody flowed out. The drums were an obvious addition for me, it’s straight out of the Phil Collins / Peter Gabriel tool box – heavy layered toms clattering like galloping horses. I love this song, it was the least thought about and possibly most effective track on the record for me.
Ezekiel
This is the total opposite of Cold Light, we gruelled over this for a long time, in fact it originally started its journey way back in 2016 when me and my mate Medlar got some dub plates cut down in Peckham by our mate Jonny. It was around the time I was moving away from making club music and dipping my toes into more jazzier lo fi realms that would soon become the foundations of what Ishmael Ensemble is today. I put together an EP of these new sounds called Boiling Wells Vol 1. I think I sold 8 in total, so there’s a few people out there with this very very very early version in their record collection.
Fever Dream
This was the first track I started that felt like an album was brewing, it felt like a giant mountain that would become the centre point of the record, with everything else either building up to it or falling down the other side. It was written whilst my wife was pregnant and the subsequent birth of our son, I remember both our sleeping patterns being really messed up and just picking this up at the most random times of day, working on it for 5 minutes here and there then blaring it out of my headphones as loud as I could to not disturb anyone in the house.
Grounded
I was listening to loads of old drum and bass whilst making this, I was a big fan of all the Metalheadz and Moving Shadow stuff as a teenager and wanted to get some of that energy into the album without making it too obvious, this does that for me. I can’t wait to start playing this one out and lean more into those influences, that’s when we can really start to push stuff to the extreme, maybe this one needs a jungle outro or something for the live show.
Madrid
Like Ezekiel, this one started its journey a long time ago. I was visiting my cousin Freddie in Madrid when we got the invite to spend a day down at Carlos & Andres from Riverette’s studio. This was back in 2016, I came away with stems from an hour or so jam on various machines & synths, to be honest 90% of it was a load of random sounds and disjointed ideas but amongst all of that, there was the perfect 3 mins of me on the juno and Freddie on the 909, locked in on a really nice groove. I’d wanted to do something for a long time with it and this album felt like the right time to do it.
Leviathan
Another one originally from the archives, I’d had this acid bassline for years and always tried to make it work in other things, but this arrangement just clicked. The name comes from Moby Dick – a giant beast of the sea. I wanted to encapsulate that feeling of dread and impending doom.
The Rush/Let Go
This one was all about doing the band thing, drums, bass, guitar, sax & vocals. It’s raw and simple and really fun to play. I love Jake’s bass at the end, proper head nodder. The drums are also wicked, it was our friend and engineer Patrick Phillips that suggested putting them through a load of distortion pedals, I tweaked the dials live as Rory played and I love that it sometimes gets out of hand but was recorded in the moment.
Butterfiles
Butterflies was written in Mexico whilst on an artist residency there, it’s one of the few tracks we made together “in the room”, I put the drums together super quickly, originally as a place-holder, but as the track developed they ended up just staying as they are – sometimes the first idea is the best one. It’s also one of my favourite Holly collabs, her development of melodies and piano voicings really shine on this one.
In Time
I’d collected loads of fragments and off cuts throughout the recording process and felt it would be cool to piece them together as a kind of outro / epilogue that rounds off all the emotions of the record. The sax at the end was run through Jake’s modular synth and kind of slowly disintegrates, like a call.