Is it alright it if I take it easy on this one? I doubt Rob Mounsey would have wanted us to over analyze his Dig. Functioning at my preferred meeting of fun, inventive, and memorable art, Dig is the increasingly rare album that is all of that while remaining distinctive enough to warrant further exploration of. You hear in it notes of jazz, fourth world, world music, balearic, and minimalism. However, Dig never sounds “heavy” or “abstract”. Released on Sona Gaia’s label, much like Hiroshi Yoshimura’s work for them, Dig gives off an expression of using leftfield ideas to capture very simple moods in far more esoteric ways, in such a way that this expression anyone would understand.
Some songs in Dig are to the point electro-acoustic groovers. Others are weightless world music-tinged ambient floaters. Rob could have explored the sound he helmed with others, but he had to do him, as they say. Melodic and engaging, it sounds just perfect for adventurous, traveling days.
An Ohio native, Rob Mounsey from an early age was a precocious sort. In his own words, his “strange ambition” was to be a composer at a very young age. Pouring over orchestration manuals, he self-taught composition, and in no time throughout highschool he wowed others with his performance skills. Parlaying his natural songwriting gifts into studies, the Berklee College of Music accepted him as a student and swiftly (even then) he was discovered by a record producer to enlist as a session musician for hire. Barely an adult, Rob would move to New York City and find himself writing and recording for musicians like Carly Simon, Michael Franks and Ashford & Simpson. In no time he was an indemand keyboardist for soul and urban jazz artists of the late ‘70s.
By the ‘80s, Rob had the distinct chops necessary to work with such people like Donald Fagen, Chaka Khan, and Paul Simon, working on albums like Graceland, Nightfly, and I Feel For You, that are now cross-genre works of recognition. Songs arranged by Rob, like Madonna’s “Crazy For You” and Diana Ross’s “Why Do Fools Fall In Love?” became chart toppers, too. The only thing missing was a way to put his own vision out.
In 1988, working with Steve Khan, Rob collaborated on an album dubbed “Local Color”. Far more in tune with the more experimental and less “Western” influences Rob had in his creative headspace, that album allowed both to branch out using jazz as a means to create music that really wasn’t that. Using a multitude of “foreign” instruments, synthesizers, and drum machines, Rob provided a distinctly unmoored idea of technologically-driven world music.
Just a year later, Rob would build on the idea of his home recording studio, one he’d dub the “Flying Monkey” to fashion an untethered consortium of musicians. This Flying Monkey Orchestra, which mostly consisted of him using all sorts of “sophisticated electronic instruments” and some musical friends like Steve Khan, Jeff Mironov, and a few more, allowed Rob to explore that world music, third way, even further.
Not so much an answer to Jon Hassell’s idea, but closer to the technologically-driven one explored by Gontiti, Hosono, and friends, Rob, using advanced sample technology and a whole host of non-Western instruments took high liberty refashioning melodic vignettes of maybe things. Maybe thing that were once of Asian flavor or African, and further, elsewhere now became other less sharp things.
Somewhere a borrowed Gravikord (a modern Ethiopian thumb harp) would make an entrance. Somewhere samples of an ice cream truck and the voice of his son’s friend would intone the spirited memory of a Haitian bus ride Rob once took. Creating musical mischief seemed to be Rob’s guiding spirit here.
Dig is very dreamy, in the way daydreams are, songs like “Codex Marine” wouldn’t sound out of place in some little known ambient masterpiece that’s just getting recognition. Heck, it’s inspiration adapting tones to the Fibonacci sequence of a conch shell, sounds utterly brilliant, in a heady way. “We Swam the Water” sounds unlike any other American electronica being done at that time, sharing more in common with European minimalism.
Then, you have the opener “3 Moons which gives you the right impression by giving off the wrong one. Is Dig some kind of leftfield African electro dance album? You’d think so just based on this track. There are short tracks like “3 Moons Again”, that are startling for examples. However this is a faint, Rob never sticks to a certain sound or a certain mood, each track seems to unearth a different style he wanted to create. In the end, that’s why Dig is so memorable, at least to me.
In the end, Rob is digging within himself to unearth something new that doesn’t sound like anything else he’s done before or revisiting worn paths. In doing so, Rob’s caught a bit more of the child in him, the one that felt freedom through learning, using this ethos to transmit its beautiful sense of wonder to the album. In the end, maybe Dig is asking us if we see the failure in self-absorption and the strength in exploration. This is a perfect example of what happens when you swing that way. It’s a simple question: How about taking this one outside?