By Andy Battaglia——

“Music can take us all around the world.” As statements of artistic intent go, this one might not seem destined to linger. We’ve heard it many times before, and usually with such a void of meaning and conviction that it can be hard to hear at all. But it sounds different issuing from the mouths of The Congos, a group of musicians who by all indications have been around the world a few times over.

The Congos are a reggae group whose hallmark album Heart of the Congoscounts as one of the classics of the genre. Released in 1977, the album was produced by Lee “Scratch” Perry at Black Ark, a recording studio so mythologised in reggae lore that the sessions there might as well as have taken place centuries ago. The mixing board at Black Ark, it has been claimed, boasted a distinctive sound because of all of the marijuana smoke blown into its controls. True or not, the music conceived there came out sounding magisterial – not least the songs of The Congos, which stirred with a unique depth of feeling and an even more unique adeptness with heavenly vocal harmonising.

More than three decades later, the music on Heart of the Congos continues to sound somehow both old and new. In certain ways, it’s the archetypal reggae record, marked by the soulful singsong cadences and loping low-end rhythms that have attended the genre since its origination in Jamaica in the late 1960s. In other ways, however, Heart of the Congos sounds like nothing so much as itself – a singular masterpiece that endures in its own realm, both real and imagined.

But the roots of all that date back to 35 years ago, while the sentiment in question – “music can take us all around the world” – is of a more recent vintage. It figures prominently on Icon Give Thank, a new album created in collaboration between the now-elder Congos and Sun Araw and M Geddes Gengras, two much younger musicians who travelled to Jamaica to make music different to their own. Sun Araw, in particular, has made a lot: since his earliest overtures in 2007, he has released a slew of albums and singles on CD, vinyl and tape – whatever media might prove amendable to his streams and slurrings of skewed neo-psychedelia.

All of that established Sun Araw as a formidable figure in the US indie underground, which happened to be swelling all around him in Los Angeles, home as well to the enterprising record label Not Not Fun and creative currents swirling in from a revitalised southern California art scene. So it is that Sun Araw (real name: Cameron Stallones) got together with a friend and found himself on a plane to Jamaica.

Footage from a flight into Kingston figures at the beginning of Icon Eye, an equally striking travelogue movie made to document the otherwise expressly musical project. (A DVD comes packaged with the album, both produced as part of the enterprising New York-run collaborative album series FRKWYS.)

The film is a worthwhile work in its own right. Shot and edited by the New York filmmaker Tony Lowe, it plays as a largely wordless visual diary of a trip filled with a genuine sense of searching for all involved. Lowe’s camera zooms in on scores of impressionistic scenes, some of them musical and many others not, which are artfully assembled and presented in a moving mosaic whole. The technique draws from a long lineage of experimental film, but the effect of it is decidedly earthy, unaffected, sincere – a chronicle of a trip taken with eyes, ears, and minds open wide.