groundsound are growing fruitful new futures for dancehall and beyond

Discover Blogly is The FADER’s curated roundup of our favorite new music discoveries.

Some artists just know the dirt. They’ve done the hard work of digging their hands in, understanding what planting and harvesting feels like between their fingers. Gavsborg displays this in the music he creates in Equiknoxx, the Jamaican collective challenging traditional conceptions of dancehall since 2007. You can also see this knowledge articulated on Working Progress, the debut project from groundsound, a duo Gavsborg co-founded with the poet and cultural critic Riddim Writer, another artist with her fingers in the soil. On the album’s cover, roots push into the ground where mystical shapes and patterns live; outside of the fertile soil, sound systems live on the tree’s branches, broadcasting the mysterious subterranean currents to the world.

Working Progress’s beginnings came with Gavsborg’s 2019 EP “Kevin From Ivory Coast,” a three-song release with Shanique Marie that Riddim Writer helped conceptualize. The music itself was pure Gavsborg in its relentless cross-genre trek for new forms of grooves, a search that boldly embraces the noisy and discordant. But with the benefit of hindsight, the seeds for Working Progress are planted in how it fully fleshed out Gavsborg’s occasional tendency to replace dancehall as the chief vessel in his music with other sounds. "Did Not Make This For Jah_9" in particular feels like foreshadowing to Working Progress: vocalist Shanique Marie counts out the rhythm of the kick drums in a deep-fried transmission from the L.A. beat scene. Her monotoned recitation of the numbers soon evolves into a joyous word game and a code to be broken.

Together, Gavsborg and Riddim Writer explore new horizons beyond Equiknoxx’s gaze. Their music is a playful and detailed celebration of the African and Caribbean diasporas, with the first track “Obeah 5 Train with Earth and the Fullness” alluding to the stakes. Here, the Caribbean ritual practice of Obeah becomes a vessel for transport in the Afrofuturist tradition. Riddim Writer delivers spoken word poetry over a gently strummed guitar, her voice full of resolve and calm. She describes a fantastical scene on the titular train with “grey-haired Black ladies dressed in Santeria whites” on this “soul train of another kind.” Earth and the Fullness, the song's featured artist, then appears with a version of "I've Been Working on the Railroad" updated for the Caribbean; it’s the kind of passionate and slightly cheeky choice that you’ll find across Working Progress.

Riddim Writer’s presence helps tie together a concept album with zero limits, other than being Caribbean as hell. The production is as immaculate as anyone familiar with Gavsborg-associated works would come to expect, but Riddim Writer matches the versatility. She can play the hype-person (“Tricky,” a vogue-worthy club track), poet (“Visa,” a dub track that treats the indignities of immigration systems with the disdain and irony that they deserve), or lead MC (“Equal Righters,” a house-pop call for equality). Whatever the mode, Riddim Writer converts her academic understanding of language into an accessible one that lives perfectly in the spaces created by the music.

"Working Progress is broken beats meets black space, memory meets magic, and decolonial meets dub,” Riddim Writer says on Bandcamp. “Each track is an invitation to skank, spin, and slip with us through time.” The genius of Working Progress is how unique each of these invitations feels and how they immediately bond us to the concerns and traditions that they are evoking.