RA Podcast

The Memphis artist also known as Cities Aviv delivers 60 minutes of stirring electronics and industrial abstractions.

Since his first release in 2010, Gavin Mays, AKA African-American Sound Recordings and Cities Aviv, has been living multiple lives. The D.O.T. label boss has put out work under various aliases, spanning post-hip-hop, ambient electronics and soul-inflected abstraction, consistently challenging and rearranging the scope of every genre he works within.

African-American Sound Recordings is Mays' "side project"—as hobbies go, it's a formidable one. Since its launch in 2019, he's released ten albums built from a dense palette of samples: distorted voices drift alongside warm currents of jazz and acoustic instrumentation, painting ambient vignettes that swerve between the serene and the industrial.

It's no coincidence that Mays cites Sunday service as a formative space. Samples of gospel worship and memories of communal ritual are the fil rouge running through the project, reimagining Black musical traditions as a living system.

RA.1024 has one of the shortest tracklists in the series to date: three total. The final two tracks, gospel recordings ripped from his own CD collection, arrive like sunlight breaking through the clouds.

Find the tracklist and interview at https://ra.co/podcast/1043
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