"Gonjasufi – the electro Hendrix"

"Gonjasufi – the electro Hendrix": Has a yoga teacher who dreams of Jimi made the global-influenced hip-hop game-changer of 2010? Malik Meer tunes in to Gonjasufi

by Malik Meer, The Guardian (UK), Saturday 6 March 2010

Under his Gonjasufi alias, San Diego-born, Las Vegas-based yoga teacher Sumach Valentine has been called many things – "hip-hop mystic", "nomad soul", even "Method Man aged 95" – but it's the "electro Hendrix" tag that will suffice for now. "Jimi Hendrix sacrificed himself to get humanity to a higher frequency; he's perfection to me," enthuses the 32-year-old down the line, in the scraggy, smoked-out drawl that colours his debut album A Sufi And A Killer. "I had a dream one time that I was at an outdoor Hendrix concert and all of a sudden, as Jimi walked towards the stage, our eyes locked, man. It was just fucking intense. Intense. When I woke up, I felt like he was checking on me, like, 'Hey, I'm watching you bro.'"

Wait! Come back! If all this talk of visions, frequencies and yoga is beginning to set your stoned hippy alert to SEVERE, don't worry just yet; reserve judgement till you've given his album a go. Sumach's impressive 19-track Warp debut is one of the strangest and most eclectic records you'll hear all year. Wrapped in crackly, analogue sounds and a cloud of industrial-strength hydroponics, a first listen lends itself to a game of spot the influences: some Turkish psych rock, the pop sensibilities of Gnarls Barkley, Isaac Hayes's rhythm tracks, MIA's pan-globalism, the aforementioned Jimi, a touch of acid folk, DJ Shadow-style crate-digging, Bollywood pioneer RD Burman's sonic adventurism, gravel-voiced rappers New Kingdom and the twisted, paranoid soul of the album's producers Flying Lotus, The Gaslamp Killer and Mainframe.

Even Sumach struggles to describe his out-there output, wandering off on a tangent, saying he wants to "scratch the resin of all the bullshit that's been out lately, all that Auto-Tune bullshit, the same-ass sound, that Kanye West sound. After 808 & Heartbreaks, he shouldn't be allowed to make any more records."

Born to a Mexican mother and an American-Ethiopian father and raised in a predominantly white neighbourhood in San Diego, Sumach's cultural and spiritual leanings are broader than most, yet he's as difficult to pin down as his music. How important is Islamic spirituality and the Sufism of the title to his music?

"I'm just a regular guy who's gone through a lot of shit," he says. "The Sufi side of life has helped me with my killer side so I try not to attach myself to any label. There's a Sufi and a killer in everybody, man, and I'll be whatever I have to be just to make it through."

Maybe "electro Hendrix" is the best we're going to get for now. So what does he think the Experienced one would have made of his unlikely voodoo child? "What would Jimi make of my music?" he asks, before the reality check kicks in. "He'd probably think this shit sucks; he's Jimi Hendrix, ha ha!"

A Sufi And A Killer is out on Monday