About

- A TAV Essential Listening Album -

The second, and sadly final, full-length album of Seba Jun’s lifetime is widely considered to be the beatmaker’s magnum opus. Although underappreciated during its initial release in 2005, Modal Soul has posthumously become Nujabes’ most cherished work.

A timeless masterpiece by any standard of measurement, this LP off his own record label Hydeout Productions, showcases the producer at his most inspired. Featuring Nujabes’ warm and captivating take on instrumental hip-hop, backboned by old soul and jazzy samples from the likes of Miles Davis and Yusef Lateef, and complemented by seven different emcees lending their intelligent lyricism to Seba’s genius compositions - Modal Soul is an unforgettably rich and chromatic sonic experience. - The Analog Vault

On November 11, 2005, Hydeout Productions released Modal Soul, the second LP from the revered Japanese producer and instrumentalist Nujabes. Since its release Modal Soul has been enshrined in the canon of classic hip-hop, cherished by a dedicated following that is modest in number but unparalleled in passion. Nujabes is usually referenced as a hip-hop producer, but Modal Soul blends such disparate influences as to become a new, one-of-a-kind world music transcending all musical, physical or temporal boundaries. While each Nujabes project is a masterpiece in itself, Modal Soul is undoubtedly the producer's most dynamic and most popular effort. 

It’s not uplifting lyrical content or the producer’s technical virtuosity that distinguishes Modal Soul, though the album has both in spades. What distinguishes Modal Soul is its mood, its essence. Splicing together a beat and a piano sample is no longer revolutionary, though Nujabes, real name Seba Jun (February 7, 1974 – February 26, 2010), does so with a master’s grace. Flipping the samples and aligning the sound to make the listener feel with such great depth – that is the revelation of Modal Soul. If you don’t feel the music, that’s okay. But for those who do, it is healing sound. It is fuel for imagination, a foundation for dreams, no less important than any music ever made.

Modal Soul can be seen as a quintessential product of the 21st century. Access to music has never been as horizontal as it is in the new millennium. In the past, musicians were limited by time and space to those resources at their direct disposal. For example, French pianist Claude DeBussy sparked a compositional revolution by experimenting with a semi-tone scale at the turn of the 19th century. DeBussy would have never used this Eastern scale - opposed to the whole-tone scale and foreign to all Western conception of what music should be - had he not heard a gamelan orchestra from the island nation of Java perform at the 1889 Paris Universal Exposition.

These geographic and temporal boundaries no longer exist for composers, and they don’t exist on Modal Soul. Nujabes was able to access musical threads from across the globe and across time - Latin sambas, Japanese jazz, African drums, American hip-hop, disco, blues, Miles Davis – and weave them into something not heard before or since. 

Take for example “Music Is Mine”. A sample of jangling, hollowed-out wood evokes the East, as does the lead piano melody played in a semi-tone scale. A trombone plays a bluesy New Orleans lead, and the piano carries an enchanting dialogue through to the song’s conclusion. Is this hip-hop? Jazz? Soul? A scholar might tell you these three terms really describe one sound, but Modal Soul actually dissolves the boundaries between these genres, making that scholarly theory a musical reality. Classic Albums 001 // The Rust