“Ann Arbor is like a soundclash,” says Michigan native Dabrye, while chiseling away at his veggie enchilada from inside San Loco, a Mexican joint on New York’s Lower East Side. Taking some time off from his beloved job manning the counter at jazz and soul retail outpost Encore Recordings back in Ann Arbor, Tadd Mullinix is in New York to talk to XLR8R about his new Ghostly International release, Two/Three. But first he’s content to wax poetic about the place he calls home; a city with so much green they call it “Tree Town.”

“Being so close to Detroit, you’ve got that urban influence,” he explains. “Now that music and culture are so global, you can get anything you want in Ann Arbor, yet it’s still relaxed.” The contrast between laidback Ann Arbor and hard-knock Detroit is a perfect foil for the music Mullinix makes as Dabrye (pronounced “dob-ree”). The Dabrye sound is rugged, technical, and sometimes banging-often closer to Timbaland than, say, El-P-but it does away with the aggression and in-your-face posturing one has come to expect from hip-hop. The music is unassuming and unpredictable, with lots of secret twists and turns-in short, it reflects Mullinix, who shows up to the interview looking like the avid skater he is, sporting an army green Etnies crew-neck sweater, a scruffy beard, and a laissez-faire hairstyle that makes him look much more approachable than his erstwhile shaved head.

A Man of Many Sides
Dabrye isn’t Mullinix’s only alter ego. Under his James T. Cotton guise, he delivers acid house and EBM that’ll make you think you’re playing Tempest on poppers; as SK-1, he makes mashed-up ragga-jungle; and, as Tadd Mullinix, he’s made experimental electronic pieces that could teach Luigi Russolo a thing or two about Futurism. Then there’s a character that he won’t cop to: Charles Manier, the maker of spooky, darkwave-disco masterpieces (as heard on Ghostly’s Disco Nouveau compilation). “I don’t talk about him,” he says with a mischievous grin. “He’ll remain my special secret.”

What all these aliases have in common-besides sharing a home on Ann Arbor’s Ghostly and Spectral Sound imprints-is a sound that is at turns evil and humorous, one that’s remarkably forward thinking but with an endearingly kitschy tinge. “The early ’80s-especially 1981 and 1982-had a big influence on my sound palette,” says Mullinix, who counts “Transformers, GoBots, Thundercats, and Silverhawks” among his favorite things.

Other favorites include decks (of both the turntable and skateboard variety), cheese, and weed, though he’s “taking a break” from the latter. His heritage may account for his dairy cravings. “I’m almost one hundred percent French,” Dabrye reveals, “so I’m eating bread, cheese, and wine on a daily basis.” So serious is he about his Roquefort that he’s close friends with cheesemonger (and DJ) Carlos Souffront, who works at famed Ann Arbor deli Zingerman’s.

Getting A Bad Rap
Dabrye debuted in 2001 with One/Three (Ghostly), an album that was the perfect soundtrack to Battlestar Galactica Cyclons doing the bump and grind; it was followed up a year later with Instrmntl, for Prefuse 73’s Eastern Developments label. He intended the music-which accentuated hard-edged electronic elements rather than the genre’s traditional funk and soul sounds-to serve as a calling card for future vocal collaborations with MCs. The indie hip-hop community got the gist-with Dabrye earning nods from J Dilla and collaborating with Five Deez’s Fat Jon-but critics and fans sometimes didn’t. Dabrye’s music was variously described as glitch-hop, click-hop, instrumental hip-hop or IDM, which he found more than annoying. “[Being labeled an IDM artist] bothered me a lot,” he confesses. “I understood that it happened because of Ghostly’s orientation and all that, but it didn’t come off as I intended.” Dabrye wanted his project to smell of industrially infected hip-hop. Instead, he laments, “It came off as another kind of electronic music.”

Dabrye was also a little confused about what was going on at his live shows (which, up until recently, had consisted of him performing solo in front of a laptop and some outboard gear). “I thought, ”Maybe I’m not painting the right picture for people,”” he recalls. “I was playing for white boys that would stand there and stroke their chins, and that bothered me. Some would dance a little, but I was like, ‘This music has sexiness in it and it needs to get to the right audience.””

Detroit Driven
The June release of Two/Three, the second installment of what’s intended as a Dabrye trilogy, will go a long way towards reaching hip-hop heads. If his first two albums were sparse and instrumental, Two/Three plays like a cipher, as Dabrye meshes his distinctive beats with vocals from a variety of MCs. “Air” features MF Doom’s intense narrative punctuated by SK-1-like interruptions from a vintage soundclash siren. “Nite Eats Day” places a fierce Beans a capella over a skittering rhythm.

The MCs here-including Wildchild and Vast Aire-don’t mince words… and neither do Dabrye’s cuts-nine out of 10 tracks on Two/Three clock in under four minutes. “I hate ornamental music,” Mullinix says firmly. “I don’t need to butter anything up.” Simplicity is the order of the day for Dabrye, who uses just two samples for most of his signature sounds. Half the time these soundbites don’t come from a dusty record, he explains. “They’re not even samples. I just went into Cool Edit Pro and generated a tone, and that was it-no keyboard or anything. Sometimes I’ll use a low-pass filter and put a chorus on it, but I do it all with an old SoundBlaster card!”

“I”m definitely coming through hard on the synthesizer shit,” he says of his new direction. “My new beats are coming off pretty dark, like a very cold and electronic vibe-almost ghetto tech.” Not surprising, then, that Two/Three features a ton of Detroit MCs, including Kadence (who will tour with Dabrye), Invincible, Finale, Guilty Simpson, Paradime, Big Tone, Phat Cat, and Slum Village members Ta’ Raach and Waajeed. “[Two/Three] is a very Detroit thing,” explains Mullinix. “Unfortunately, Detroit doesn’t get all the credit it deserves.”

One Motor City stalwart who does get shine is the recently departed J Dilla, the founder of Slum Village who Dabrye credits with inspiring him to make instrumental hip-hop in the first place. “If you listen to Slum Village, you’re talking about laidback, creamy soul that’s street but still conscious, and without being backpacker,” he says with admiration. The prolific producer shines as a rapper on Dabrye’s “Game Over” single, the cornerstone of Two/Three, and the regard he has for Dilla is obvious. “Jay Dee was my hero,” he says humbly. “A lot of people slept on his rapping style because it was little too subtle for most people to understand.”

Game Over?
The only question remaining is where does Dabrye go from here? When asked what direction he’s planning on taking this trilogy, Mullinix presents two options. “The first idea is to make Three/Three an instrumental end-cap, so it’ll go instrumental [album]/vocal [album]/instrumental [album],” he explains. “The other idea, since I have so much momentum in the hip-hop community, is to go [to] the next level with MCs. If I could get Busta Rhymes on the album I’d be stoked!”

Mullinix is quite expressive when he talks about other people’s music and the MCs he’s worked with, but he is noticeably more introverted when, as the interview comes to a close, he’s grilled for adjectives to describe his own sound. “Music fills in the gaps,” he offers. “It expresses the emotions that we, or at least I, don’t have words for.”

In 1968, Hugh Masekela experienced what some would consider a career apex. The South African trumpet and flugelhorn player came to the US in 1961 to study at the Manhattan School of Music. Seven years later, his single “Grazing in the Grass,” which eventually sold four million copies, hit number one in the charts. But he wasn’t completely thrilled.

“Being an anti-establishment person, that didn’t really intrigue me that much,” he says. “I thought [the label execs] were fucking squares and exploitative.”

Masekela was only moved by one thing: honest, soulful music. His passion took him around the world, propelling into business as one of the founders of the influential independent label, Chisa. Masekela lived like a rock star–he received a trumpet in the mail from Louis Armstrong when he was 17, Miles Davis gave him career advice when he was gigging in New York in the ’60s, and he got along “like a brother” with Afro-beat legend Fela Kuti–but none of it really got to his head. “Musicians are ordinary people,” says Masekela. “They eat, they play, they shit.”

What moved this firebrand was music, especially the under-appreciated rhythms of Africa, and they led him to start Chisa (Swahili for “hot” or “burning”) in 1966. As the powerful new compilation of never-before-heard gems, The Chisa Years 1965-1975 (Rare and Unreleased) (BBE), demonstrates, this artist-run label pushed passionate new music forward. Years before world music became a bland marketing term, Masekela and Chisa were fusing genres, capturing the raw sound of funk, Afro-beat, jazz, and South African rhythms. “I love all kinds of music,” he says. “I’ve loved it since I was a child, and children don’t categorize. I still don’t categorize.”

Born in 1939 in Witbank, South Africa, Masekela grew up surrounded by records. Absorbing everything from local bands to Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington, he became so obsessed with vinyl that his parents gave him piano lessons at age six to drag him away from the record player. But it was a movie he saw at age 13, Young Man With a Horn (based on the life of jazz trumpeter Bix Beiderbecke) that entranced him.

“In the movie, Kirk Douglas [who played the Beiderbecke character] stood in front of the band, had the most beautiful threads, took all the solos, didn’t take shit from anybody, and got the girl,” Masekela remembers. “It seemed like the instrument to play.”

Soon, the young Masekela was begging for a horn. Local anti-apartheid Archbishop Trevor Huddleston, who helped the trumpeter get into his first band and later asked Louis Armstrong to send him a certain gift, granted his request in 1954. Masekela started jamming, but as the oppressive political climate of apartheid started to limit opportunities–”South Africa was in leg irons,” he recounts–he began looking elsewhere for musical opportunities. Singer Miriam Makeba, a childhood friend whom he would marry later in life, had already made a name for herself overseas. She helped convince him to come study in New York.

Masekela arrived in 1961, and Makeba introduced him to her musical inner circle, including Dizzy Gillespie and other jazz heavyweights. But his meeting with classmate Stewart Levine was just as profound. A fellow music obsessive, Levine (now a world-famous producer) became Masekela’s friend and roommate. They soaked up live music in New York, clubbing until the early morning and returning to their apartment to dance to Masekela’s mbaqanga records, a style that originated in South African townships.

By late 1966, Levine and Masekela, who had then relocated to Los Angeles, formed Chisa, and things started to move quickly. They inked a distribution deal with Uni Records (now Universal) in 1967, signed the Jazz Crusaders, and soon “Grazing in the Grass” reached hit status. But Uni wasn’t interested in anything past the hit record, so Chisa split and many records remained unreleased. But Masekela, who was now playing sold-out gigs around the US and opening for Motown acts on the road, started talking with Berry Gordy, Motown Records’ president. Soon, the two labels were working hand in hand.

But it wasn’t enough to keep Chisa afloat. Motown was down with marketing the label, but it didn’t perform well enough and folded in 1975. Like Masekela, the label was all about music, yet it wasn’t hard to understand why songs about corruption and racism made it onto many Chisa records.

“I think that any artist that comes from an oppressed community and doesn’t sing or talk about it needs his head examined,” he said. “Now, I wasn’t making music because of oppression; I was making music because I loved it and it’s all I’ve ever done. The fact that I came from a country with oppressed people was just a coincidence. Had I been a garbage man, I would have been just as militant,” he exclaims.

While Chisa came to a premature close, its spirit lives on. Masekela, who still records, didn’t stop following his convictions when the label folded. He recorded and toured extensively in the ’70s and ’80s, appearing with Paul Simon during the Graceland tour and writing “Bring Him Back Home,” an anthem for then-imprisoned leader Nelson Mandela, in 1985.

More importantly, he remained in the business of making records and supporting artists, especially after returning to South Africa in 1990. He now runs Chissa, a label similarly dedicated to DIY principles, and performs with many young South African artists. Decades after starting a label that predicted the boom in world music, Masekela is still supporting African music. Until there are more Africans running record labels, it’s a role he won’t stop playing.

“I think the local music industry needs to becomes an African-owned industry, where we have our own distribution and retail,” he notes. “So far, it’s been a market that’s been exploited, like minerals and cheap labor were exploited on this continent. What’s important is to build an African industry that’s independent. The thing is for Africans to be successful at home like Americans are successful at home.”