Fade to Deepblak

As head of the innovative Oakland-based label Deepblak Recordings,
producer Armon Bazile always has his eyes wide open to the pulse of
emerging music in the Bay Area. “The musical underground railroad is
rumbling,” he said. “There’s some brilliant stuff going on, especially
here in Oakland. A lot of people are taking chances again.” But for
Bazile (aka Aybee), it’s been an uphill battle without armor.

Deepblak’s brand of mind-expanding Afrofuturism — rich,
melodic post-techno, electronic, and jazzy dance-music hybrids —
hasn’t been typically embraced by his community, which tends to favor
Oakland’s “hyphy” party hip-hop and gangster street tales. “I’m from
the Town but people hear this stuff and think I’m from Europe,” said
Bazile, who grew up in East Oakland before recently moving to the more
affluent Grand Lake neighborhood.

Bazile recalled an incident where a clubgoer spit on a friend’s
turntables because he didn’t have any songs by E-40. “It wasn’t an
isolated incident,” he said. “Anything left of center isn’t accepted.
That’s a problem when your mind is that closed that you can’t listen to
anything outside of what media feeds you.”

However, audiences and artists are increasingly starting to embrace
electronic music. Locally, artists such as AmpLive and rising producer
Trackademicks are fusing elements of house and techno with hip-hop.
Nationally, Black Eyed Peas’ house-inspired “I Gotta Feeling” (produced
by French house DJ David Guetta) has shown how electronic music can
give new life to the stagnant pop genre.

In addition to his own releases, Bazile’s label has issued diverse
electronic sounds by Oakland’s Blaktroniks, Afrikan Sciences, and Damon
Bell; a collaboration between Bazile and Toronto’s Trinidadian Deep;
and a compilation (Deepblak Presents Blaktropolis) featuring
artists like North Carolina’s Erik Rico and New York’s Black Jazz
Consortium. The local crew occasionally meets at Bazile’s pad to
exchange ideas and upload videos to the label’s web site. It’s a true
Town collective as deep as the Hieroglyphics or the Zoo Complex —
the only problem is, no one cares about techno in Oakland.

Were Deepblak based in Detroit or Europe, where electronic music
thrives, the story would be different. In fact, Bazile’s strongest
radio, club, and press support comes from Europe, where tastemakers
such as DJ Mickey Blanco and web site BeyondJazz.net have given high praise to
the label’s works. As an all-black electronic record label based in the
East Bay, Deepblak has not only pioneered a new sound but has had to
struggle to gain acceptance in their local community.

“You have people that don’t think electronic music was started here,
that don’t think it was started by black people,” Bazile said,
referring to the United States. “They have no idea.”

The techno genre briefly flirted with commercial success in this
country at its height in the late Eighties and early Nineties before
fading from the mainstream spotlight. It’s something that became “big
in Europe” and a whisper in underground club circles. African-American
electronic musicians Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson are
credited as the godfathers of techno, pioneering the Detroit sound in
the Eighties that became the springboard for its many offshoots and
subgenres. Almost simultaneously, DJ Frankie Knuckles was developing
house music in Chicago while DJs like Larry Levan popularized it on the
New York club scene. It was a fast-paced evolution that embraced
technology. Two decades later, Bazile says that his approach is no
different than his predecessors’.

“It’s a progressive, future-tinged black music,” said Bazile.
Deepblak’s artists aren’t trying to create a new genre, he says, but
rather “we’re just playing with advanced tools, articulating
21st-century blues music with all the technology that we have.”

At six-foot-six, Bazile could have pursued his passion for
basketball. Or he could have followed in his father’s footsteps and
gotten into local politics. Bazile’s father, Leo, was an Oakland city
councilman who, at different points in his career, worked for former
California governor and Oakland mayor Jerry Brown and with former San
Francisco mayor George Moscone. Though he played college ball and
majored in political science, Bazile was bitten by the art bug.

Bazile always had music stuck in his head. He was a fidgety kid who
constantly made beats on his desk with his hands, while other kids
rapped to it. Slowly, his handmade beats became more intricate and, in
high school, he picked up some equipment and started producing. Not
taking it seriously, he put it down until 1998, when he started the
now-defunct SFNite.com, an online
magazine that covered San Francisco nightlife. Inspired by the DJs and
producers he’d befriended on the club scene, he went back to his old
habit. Except what he heard in his head was different from what he
heard in the clubs, and these new sounds frustrated him to no end.
Making music, he says, was a means to save his sanity. “It got to a
point where it was driving me crazy, like literally: “‘Ahh! Get this
rhythm out of my head!'”

Bazile founded Deepblak in 2001 as a home for avant-garde soul music
and an outlet to release his own material. Technically astute, Bazile
has an open-minded approach to music, toying and experimenting with new
sounds. Sonically, he’s like a techno equivalent of the late Detroit
production genius J Dilla, fiddling with buttons and knobs on the
Starship Enterprise, inhaling nebulous matter while drifting toward a
distant star. His official full-length debut under his Aybee moniker,
East Oakland Space Program, released this year on Deepblak,
finds him flexing his versatility with complex arrangements that
stretch from broken-beat jazz to rhythmic techno grooves. Equally fit
for the club or for lounging, the album has mellow, deep house cuts
like “Ozzie Davis” while Erik Rico provides the vocal assistance for
future soul jam “So Much Greater.”

There isn’t a singular term to define Bazile’s music, which is why
he operates under various aliases. In November, he released his third
EP Breads and Circuses under his “Oakland’s One and Only” (o 1
o) identity. The album is comprised of progressive hip-hop influenced
productions that Bazile refers to as “cosmic slap.”

Deepblak’s music is as Oakland as Too $hort’s, rooted in the same
bass-heavy culture that has trunks rattling up and down MacArthur
Boulevard. (In fact, Blaktroniks’ 1996 debut, Return of the
Afronaut, features a dedication to Too $hort, titled “Autobiography
of a G.”) When making a beat, Bazile makes sure the drums hit him in
the chest. He also makes it a point that the next song he creates
renders the previous obsolete. “I’m trying to push the boundaries,”
Bazile said. “Not in an egotistical way, but I’m trying to push
my boundaries and what we’re bringing to the table.”

Now in his late thirties, clean shaven except for a chin shrub, and
dressed sharply in a plain white button-up shirt and jeans, he looks
like the CEO of a computer software startup. Which, in a way, he is.
Bazile views himself not as a label head but an art dealer. Deepblak’s
artists create the music, and his job is to frame it and expose it to
the world. The label provides a platform for its artists and the
freedom to express music “free of boxes,” Bazile said.

“Imagine all of us sitting in preschool and someone gives this kid a
whole crayon box and they only give you four colors,” he continued.
“You can only color on half the page, and you can only use the blue
three times. That’s not art.” Bazile, who, when not cooped up in his
studio, works in the nonprofit sector as a consultant and community
organizer, sees artistic constraints as responsible for killing
Oakland’s music culture. “When you put these limitations on peoples’
creativity, you take the power away.” By contrast, Bazile has given
creative power and an expansive palette to a host of talented local
producers.

In Oakland, monthly party “the People,” now in its second year and
currently held at the New Parish, is helping to broaden clubgoers’
musical palettes. The party, led by DJs Cali, Be Brown, and Cecil, is
centered around eclectic electronic stylings, from deep house and
broken beat to hip-hop and nu jazz. Prior to that, DJ Dedan spun
soulful house records for his Brothers and Sisters party at Luka’s
Taproom, holding it down steady for six years.

Yet few Oakland artists have been daring enough to venture away from
traditional rap and R&B. Among the first to do Detroit-style techno
in Oakland was Blaktroniks, who recently joined the Deepblak camp.

“Blaktroniks started before I started,” Bazile said. “They took a
lot of lumps for representing what they represent. Because they did
what they did, it gave me the audacity to think I could do what I
do.”

Midwest transplants Eddie Patrick Smith (aka Edd Dee Pee) and Badi
Malik (aka Percepticon) — the duo that makes up Blaktroniks
— have grown accustomed to being the odd men out. “We’ve never
had a predominantly black crowd at a show,” Smith said. Both came to
the Bay Area separately, Smith with his family as an adolescent and
Malik for work thirteen years ago, before eventually crossing paths and
joining forces, putting out self-released records in the mid-Nineties.
Smith ultimately settled in Oakland to be a part of the city’s thriving
music scene and because it was more “sociable” for a young
African-American than San Francisco. He credits artists such as Too
$hort, who used a vocoder and drum machine in his early recordings,
R&B/pop production duo Foster and McElroy, who produced for Club
Nouveau and Tony! Toni! Toné!, and Digital Underground for
laying the groundwork for techno and electronic music in the Bay Area.
Bay Area-based Fantasy Records, which released albums by Charles
Mingus, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and many others, also released
works by Cybotron, a Detroit techno group comprised of Juan Atkins and
Richard “3070” Davis and credited as being the first techno group, in
the early Eighties.

Often overlooked in their own backyard, Blaktroniks have appeared at
a number of techno, drum ‘n’ bass, and electronic events across the bay
in San Francisco and throughout Europe. But at a show you might not
recognize them as Bay Area techno pioneers. Dressed casually, Smith
wears a Blaktroniks hooded sweatshirt, Malik a white long-sleeve
button-up and black-frame glasses.

Both Smith and Malik have been making music for twenty years. As a
group and individually, they’ve made everything from broken beat to
deep house. But if you ask them, they’ll say they’re
“post-everything.”

Blaktroniks isn’t just a name; it’s their musical philosophy. “It’s
the science and discipline of production,” Smith explained.

“It’s an escape for us,” added Malik, who had no intentions of being
labeled “techno” or “electronic.” “We don’t have to conform to a techno
aesthetic or hip-hop aesthetic. We don’t have to make any apologies or
excuses, either.”

Smith and Malik had to go to Europe, where electronic music is
constantly being cranked out, to find success. After several
self-released records, they caught the attention of German label Moving
Records in 2000, who released their full-length Seduction at 33
1/3 in 2001. Their catalog includes seven EPs and LPs, including
this year’s Slapmatik EP on Deepblak and 2008’s Mechanized
Soul, which features the vocals of Smith’s father, Edward Robinson,
on German label Phazz-a-delic.

According to the duo, the album made the best-seller list for soul
music on Amazon Germany last Christmas. They’ve performed all over
Europe, but at home they struggle to gain acceptance from their peers,
both in their artistic and cultural communities.

“People laughed in our faces,” Malik said. “People were just not
really believing us. I’d go to a club, like, ‘Hey, I do drum ‘n’ bass,
too,’ and they’re like, ‘Yeah, right.'” But their Oakland music peers
mostly ignored them. “‘You trying to sell this in the ‘hood? Are you
crazy?'” Malik said people have said to him. “We’re some black dudes
from Oakland. To people, that’s just as crazy as some dude from Iceland
doing it,” Smith said.

Much of this shock and disbelief is due to the lack of electronic
music’s representation in the mainstream and, more importantly, in
black media. There is no “Best Techno” or “Best House” category at the
BET Awards, or at the MTV Video Music Awards, for that matter. As far
as black media is concerned, this arm of black music doesn’t exist,
Bazile says.

This year, the Detroit Electronic Music Festival drew more than
80,000 people. The massive music festival was cofounded by Detroit
techno wizard Carl Craig and was headlined this year by veteran English
breakbeat techno trio the Prodigy.

“Did TV One talk about it? No. Did BET talk about it? No. Did Oprah
talk about it? No. Did Vibe cover it? No,” said Smith, a barber
whose musical roots run deep. A classically trained sax player, Smith
studied under jazz drummer Eddie Marshall. He’s also a grandnephew of
jazz legend Count Basie. Because of his extensive knowledge of music,
Smith isn’t bound to one particular style or sound. On one song, he may
rap; the next might be a jazz composition. His music background gives
him a keen appreciation of Bazile’s mission and vision.

“Aybee has been around us and the music,” Smith said. “He
understands that it’s not about all that other BS. It’s not about all
these lenses that other people see through. And the problem is that
they’re seeing it instead of hearing it.”

“Music, for all of humanity, used to have some spiritual
connection,” said Malik. “It’s not feeding us spiritually anymore
— it’s tearing us down. It’s destroying us.”

This spirituality and divinity through music is what all Deepblak
artists have in common. As DJ and producer Damon Bell says, they all
vibrate on the same plane. But for each artist, the name Deepblak means
different things. For Malik, it’s a place in his imagination and a
feeling that can’t be put into words. For Bell, who released his
percussive, Afro-tech Kush Music pt. 1 EP on Deepblak earlier
this year, it’s an ideology rooted in strength, not a description of
color.

“It is a goal to let people know who we are and where we come from,”
said Bell, who uses “black” as a term of endearment. “But in this
society within electronic music, we’re not trying to be labeled as
‘black electronic musicians from Oakland.’ Music should speak for
itself.” And the music from the Deepblak camp is speaking loudly.

Late 2009 and early 2010 will see a heavy slate of releases,
including Bazile and Afrikan Science’s The Nibiru Projekt, an EP
from Oakland’s Aku9, the Blaktropolis 2 compilation, and a new
live show consisting of Bazile, Afrikan Sciences, Blaktroniks, and
Damon Bell on laptops and MIDI-controlled drum pads and keyboards.

For Deepblak’s artists, and for Bazile especially, it’s not strictly
about output; Deepblak is a state of mind. “Some people interpret it as
deep black-ness, in terms of culture,” he said. “But I was actually
thinking ‘deep space’ in terms of having that silence, just being at a
complete void and being able to listen to yourself — nothing but
your thoughts, your inner voice that connects you with the Creator.
That’s what I’m about. It’s that exploration, it’s that freedom, that
internal drum.”