Mickey Hart of The Grateful Dead’s New LP ‘RAMU,’ Tops World Music Chart

On November 10th, legendary Grateful Dead drummer, solo artist and world music GRAMMY-winner Mickey Hart released his 14th solo album – RAMU – on Verve Forecast and now the album has reached #1 on the Billboard World Music chart. This is Hart’s second time topping the chart as a solo artist and his 6th top 10 World Music album. RAMU was co-produced by Michal Menert, formerly of Pretty Lights, and features Avey Tare from Animal Collective, and Tank from Tank and the Bangas as guest vocalists. In addition to their contributions, RAMU features the incredible Zakir Hussain on tabla, bassist Oteil Burbridge, talking drum master Sikiru Adepoju, guitarist Steve Kimock, multi-instrumentalist Charles Lloyd, and Jason Hann of String Cheese Incident. Recordings of the late Jerry Garcia, the late Babatunde Olatunji, and unreleased field recordings by Alan Lomax also appear on the album. Order your copy of RAMU digitally and on CD here. Mickey Hart is currently on tour with Dead & Company.

The album’s title – RAMU – is also the name of Hart’s Random Access Musical Universe, a musical database of recordings  that Mickey began collecting in the late 60’s and has been utilizing in the live sphere since the 80’s. RAMU started out as a place for Hart to collect and organize “musical universes” – things as analogue as tom toms and djembes, a vast amount of digital loops and samples, and sonifications of things like the cosmos, plants, and brain cells.

Hart eventually made RAMU into a tactile instrument, one with knobs, faders and pedals. “It’s a very powerful compositional tool,” says Hart. “It’s vast, it holds new treasures, and it’s still revealing itself to me. It’s been a growth period for RAMU as well, because it has new food, new data. So when you’re working with it, every place you turn, you find interesting stuff-music is endless, just as RAMUis.” Above all RAMU‘s main focus is its rhythmic drive:  a multi-dimensional rhythm machine at play, embedded in a universe made of controlled vibrations. This is the foundation for the RAMU album – the vast world of recordings within the database, and the infinite possibilities the instrument has for building new recordings upon them.

RAMU was recorded at Mickey Hart’s Studio X in Sonoma County.

For more information visit www.mickeyhart.net

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