Teebs

Part of the Brainfeeder roster that includes Flying Lotus and Samiyam, Los Angeles producer Teebs shapes an atmospheric strain of the beat-driven sound associated with the imprint. Warm samples and unhurried textures came to the fore on releases such as the 2014 album Estara.

Born Mtendere Mandowa to parents from Malawi and Barbados, Teebs moved with his family from the Bronx through Georgia and Hartford, Connecticut before settling in Chino Hills, a Los Angeles suburb. By the mid-2000s he had begun working simultaneously as a painter and a beat-maker, using Fruity Loops to stack samples into intricate compositions; both solo work and projects with the My Hollow Drum collective led to ties with Dublab, the city’s nonprofit internet radio station. Attendance at the 2008 Red Bull Music Academy in Barcelona drew the notice of Flying Lotus, and the two later became neighbors and creative partners. Several short releases appeared in 2010, among them the Jackhigh/BNJMN collaboration The Tropics, the Daedelus-featuring Los Angeles 6/10, and Why Like This?, Teebs’s first Brainfeeder outing. While finishing his debut album he confronted successive personal losses—his brother’s illness and his father’s death—that gave Ardour, also issued in 2010, its measured emotional current. The next year brought Collections 01, a library-music-styled compilation that included contributions from harpist Rebeka Raff and Austin Peralta. Apart from the Prefuse 73 collaboration Sons of the Morning and its 2013 release Speak Soon, Vol. 1, Teebs concentrated on visual projects for several years, among them the Ante Vos series in which he repurposed discarded album covers. His return to recording yielded 2014’s Estara, a more deliberate set of pieces titled after his home and featuring Prefuse 73 and Jonti. Five years passed before new music arrived, yet the 2019 album Anicca marked a vivid re-entry with its fluid beats and samples and guest appearances by Panda Bear, Sudan Archives, Anna Wise, and additional vocalists.