I regularly search Bandcamp for Chicago releases, and this past August I found the album Bless the Mad. At that point it was still a month from release, with only a few tracks streaming, and the information on the Bandcamp page didn’t enlighten me much—just the identities of the core members of the group behind the music, also called Bless the Mad, plus a little backstory and a detailed breakdown of the guest players on each track. Unfortunately, I didn’t recognize a single name.

Fifteen people contributed to the album, though only two are members of Bless the Mad: producers and multi-instrumentalists Ibrahem Hasan and Matthew Rivera. While this is their debut under that name, they’ve collaborated for nearly 20 years. They’ve been releasing music here and there for most of that time, the majority of it since 2014 and on their own label, Stay the Course Records, but Bless the Mad is their first full-length album.

  • A compilation of Hasan and Rivera’s early work together

They’ve continued to collaborate even as that distance has grown. Hasan, who now works as a freelance creative director in Brooklyn, first moved out of Chicago in 2001 and hasn’t lived here in more than a decade. Rivera has moved around a lot too, and in March he went to Japan to teach English. They haven’t lived in the same place since the late 2000s—Rivera joined Hasan in New York in 2008, after Hasan sent him a remix of material they’d recorded together, and then Hasan moved to Portland, Oregon, in 2010 for work. They made most of Bless the Mad over the past couple years in Hasan’s home studio, working piecemeal whenever Rivera could visit. The two of them contributed mostly percussion and keyboards to the skeletons of their productions, roping in friends they’d made in New York to flesh them out fully.

Hasan That record was the 70s revolt sound. I don’t know what it was about that record for me that it just hit that way.

Hasan It’s funny, [this album] was not a direct influence, but I think it was the overall sound—the structure, the vocal structure. Even to this day, I still think we have so much to learn in respect to song structure—just the song arrangements and whatnot. I think that record probably was helping, and the vocal chants, and how they arranged vocals, which is very new for us. We’re still in the infancy of figuring that out.