Conceived as a soundtrack to a film that doesn't exist, City Swamp is a dystopian suite of meticulously reconstructed jazz improvisations from some of the UK's finest instrumentalists. Drawing on the hypnotic groove of electric-era Miles Davis, the album announces the Maisha founder as an artist in his own right, breaking new ground on what is a heady and conceptually adventurous debut.
Immersed in the anti-capitalist writings of cultural theorist Mark Fisher, City Swamp is intended to represent the dystopian cycles of decay and faceless regeneration of London. The sprawling surrealism of Funkadelic and Miles Davis' Bitches Brew were touchpoints, as were the deep sonics of Betty Davis and D'Angelo's Black Messiah. Listening to krautrock or techno as much as the '60s spiritual jazz of Pharoah Sanders and Alice Coltrane that first inspired Maisha, Long's interest in mixing and production has ultimately informed a record whose sound is as sophisticated as the ideas which underpin it.
Simmering across four expansive tracks, the album begins with the 15-minute 'Ideological Rubble', a track that sets the conceptual tone for a record built from the fragments of past recordings. "Something needs to crumble or be completely destroyed before something new can grow out of it," Long explains, speaking to both Fisher's politics and the way the album was constructed. At once both loose and tightly controlled, 'Ideological Rubble' ebbs and flows, breaking down and rising up around repeated refrains that bubble without boiling over.
