Go Bananas by Fortyone

Fortyone is a rigorous, and only incidentally anonymous, composer of aleatoric music. Building sample-based songs in the vein of collage-pop auteur Otis Fodder and the Bran Flakes, he churns through thrift store records and other finds to assemble a bank of usable samples. After only a single pass through each haul, he’s collected everything he needs and refuses to revisit individual albums. Among the pratfalls of this process, "...the tracks appear on albums in the order I make them, so I'm often hoping I'll have enough drum, instrument, or vocal samples left for later on in an album. I have to keep this in mind as I make the album, [because] it's never concrete..." Though none of his own compositions take their structure from sampled works, lyrics and repeated themes occasionally seem to cohere into narratives. His current "life’s work" is a Gnostic canon enshrined at 41music.net, mapping his progress toward forty one releases composed according to the "Fortyone process."

Go Bananas was drawn from that template, becoming remarkable -- at least from our perspective -- by primarily sampling from Crash Symbols releases. After enthusiastically approving the idea, we sent along links to (you guessed it) forty-one of our previous and upcoming releases, with nearly every Crash Symbols artist at the time represented.

For him, the album was very naturally born out of coincidences: "I had just started playing drums, and just happened to have smashed up a crash cymbal pretty good, and re-discovered the HardKnox song "Fire Like This" and its astonishing drum beat... and then I’m put in touch with a label called Crash Symbols and they just happen to send me their Lil' Kids album where I find a "go bananas!" sample when I asked for a total of 41 releases. The theme of going bananas, perhaps on the drums and smashing up a cymbal, could then be an appropriate and a cool image, and boom: there's a concept and and and... any of this make any sense?”

"Bananas" appears as theme music for sketch comedy show Sketch 22,
http://youtu.be/IOuzE4mFPaw

Included on Tape Famous' 2013 Best Cassettes List (Quirky),
http://tapefamous.com/post/69907532680/best-cassettes-quirky

"The Avalanches and DJ Shadow are two names that come to mind when I think of sample-driven instrumental hip-hop. What if you took their signature palette of vintage vocal interludes, dusty breaks and oddball loops, and took a healthy does of Speed? Well, that would be Fortyone’s Go Bananas . . . Complete with all the sounds you loved from the works of Endtroducing….., Since I Left You and the like, Go Bananas twists and turns with incredible ingenuity. Just as you feel yourself digging deep into one of his funky grooves, Fortyone slaps together an off-kilter transition that changes the pace of the album entirely." -Potholes In My Blog

Tracklist

1.	Good Throw	2:41

2.	Bananas	2:41

3.	Golden Corral Dessert	4:34

4.	Ridiculous	4:01

5.	Little Flower (feat. Cosmic Sound)	3:47

6.	Feel Me (feat. MondreM.A.N.)	0:30

7.	I Like It Very Much	4:46

8.	Rhubarb	3:57

9.	Some Fun Sounds	0:30

10.	Basketball Dribble	3:35

11.	A Very Nice Halloween Song	3:41

12.	Ric Flair	3:41

13.	Something	2:34

14.	Good Catch	5:00

Credits

released August 27, 2013

License

CC BY-NC 3.0. See the Creative Commons website for details.