Owusu & Hannibal

Danish modernists Philip Owusu and Robin Hannibal are among a small number of artists — Jamie Lidell, Eric Lau, Sa-Ra Innovative Partners, and Henrik Schwarz are many others — attempting to discover a way ahead for soul music and R&B in the 21st century by blending it with home, broken master, trip-hop, and other styles of electronica. Both Copenhagen natives, although they consider themselves worldwide citizens 1st and Danish second, Hannibal (previously of jazzy hip-hop collective No one Beats the Beats) and Owusu (a vocalist of Ghanaian descent, briefly area of the home duo Owusu & Green, who released one 12″ on Nude Music) were launched by a shared friend, quickly strike it off over overlapping musical passions — specifically their shared like of Sly Rock — and started working collectively in early 2005. Their 1st collaborative creation, the moody damaged defeat clunker “Delirium,” captured the attention from the groove-centric indie Ubiquity Information, who released it like a 12″ that November. The full-length COPING WITH… followed a 12 months later, having a dozen originals along with a glistening cover from the Seaside Males’ “Caroline No,” created and performed nearly completely by Owusu & Hannibal, who stay a totally studio-bound task. A smooth, significantly downtempo, but futuristically funky full-length that oozed style but also shown a definite playful bent and garnered evaluations to everyone from J Dilla and D’Angelo to Scritti Politti and Steely Dan, the record found favor using the tastemaking enjoys of Gilles Peterson, Trevor Jackson, and Morgan Geist, who acquired added a remix towards the “Delirium” one and afterwards tapped Owusu to sing for Metro Region on the first-ever vocal monitor, “Browse My Brain.”