Combining jazz, hip hop, funk, and “atmospheric melodies,” El Jazzy Chavo‘s Aspects of Dystopia is a cool, mood-altering record that can be experienced in different moods, on different days, and through different listening systems all to various effects.
The overriding theme of the album is the day-to-day struggle of the lower class living in places with people (and buildings) who overlook them. “Futurama” is like the opening track to a film about a renegade graffiti artist in a totalitarian regime and a place where “the deep snow buries any sound.”
The groove of “Slap of Realism” is rooted in electro-bass and and processed beats that sound almost like they’re coming from the back of a bodega down the street. “Below the City” is surprisingly bright, as if you went into the sewers to hide from killer robots and discovered a vibrant colony of other survivors there. “Delusion” would fit well into a horror film with its simple synth stabs and ethereal chords.
“Where the Stars Don’t Shine” is the track that introduced me to El Jazzy Chavo. The wicked beats, sampled horns, and lounge vibraphone sounds hooked me right away. “The voice you hear is not my speaking voice,” a woman says at the beginning of “La Sirena de la Salva,” and then siren-like calls emerge from your speakers alongside smooth guitars and snappy beats. “Threshold of Sensation” has a neat warped sound to it that almost makes you feel drunk.
“Swallowed by Normality” has a neat switch near the end that shakes you out of your relaxation, but not in a harsh way. The sampled brass on “Hemispheres” is a great accompaniment to the vaporwave synths. “Return to Forever” is waiting for a rapper of mad skills to come along and use it in his next track. “Andromeda” has some of the best use of sampled raps on the record.
“Barefoot in the Storm” has a groove as relaxing at the title implies, and “Stealing in the Moonlight” is just as slick. The album ends with, appropriately, “Oblivion.” The track isn’t gloomy, however. It’s more of a blissful peace one finds as you fall into a well-deserved rest. The album ends with the sampled lyrics of, “I look out the attic window and watch the world go by. I feel like an outsider. I’m on a different wavelength than everybody else.”
He is, and Aspects of Dystopia will put you onto El Jazzy Chavo’s wavelength.
Anika – the project of Berlin-based musician Annika Henderson who is also a founding member of Exploded View – announces Change, her first new album in over a decade, out July 23rd on Sacred Bones & Invada, and shares the “Change” video directed by Sven Gutjahr who also directed the video for recent single “Finger Pies.” The follow-up to cult favorite Anika (2010), Change is beautifully fraught. The intimacy of its creation and a palpable sense of global anxiety are seemingly baked into the album’s DNA. Spread across nine tracks, the central feeling of the record is one of heightened frustration buoyed by guarded optimism. The songs offer skittering, austere electronic backdrops reminiscent of classic Broadcast records or Hi Scores-era Boards of Canada, playing them against Anika’s remarkable voice—Nico-esque, beautifully plaintive, and—in regards to the record’s subject matter—totally resolute.
Having worked collaboratively in the past with the likes of BEAK> and Exploded View, Change was ultimately the product of necessity. After recording the initial ideas by herself at Berlin’s Klangbild Studios, Anika was joined by Exploded View’s Martin Thulin, who co-produced the album and played some live drums and bass. “This album had been planned for a little while and the circumstances of its inception were quite different to what had been expected,” says Anika. “This colored the album quite significantly. The lyrics were all written there on the spot. It’s a vomit of emotions, anxieties, empowerment, and of thoughts like—How can this go on? How can we go on?”
Recorded at a time when literally everyone in the world was being forced to take stock, rethink, and reimagine their own place in the cosmos of things, Anika provides the wizened perspective of an outsider. It’s a perspective that is not lost on the British ex-pat and former political journalist, and despite the subject matter and the circumstances around its creation, Change itself is ultimately a treatise on optimism. The title track presents the album’s message writ large: “I think we can change, we all have things to learn, about ourselves and about each other.” To end the record on such a sanguine note might be one of Change’s most revolutionary gestures.
“There’s a lot of stuff I want to change,” says Anika. “Some things I sat down and decided last year, I had to change about myself and my life. Sometimes it feels helpless because the things we want to change are so huge and out of our control. Starting with yourself is always a good place. I think we can change.” Watch “Change” Video
Moon Safari, the classic ambient / house / lounge album by Air (Jean-Benoît Dunckel and Nicolas Godin) was pretty much an instant classic as soon as it was released. I remember reading reviews that more or less called it “cool elevator music.” It’s far beyond such a label. It’s a “mood change” record, as in it can change the mood you’re in or the mood of any room in which it’s played.
The opener, “La Femme D’Argent,” with its ultra-smooth hand percussion and keyboards, immediately shifts your brain into a meditative space and should be played in dentist offices around the world. The song is never in a hurry. It’s about a seven-minute groove beamed into your brain from aliens who might be high. The slightly menacing “Sexy Boy” tells a tale of hyper-masculinity and wanting to be “as beautiful as a god.”
“All I Need,” featuring Beth Hirsch on vocals, brings in lovely, almost Spanish, acoustic guitar as Hirsch sings to a perspective lover to let her be a light to him. “Kelly, Watch the Stars!” is mostly an instrumental (the title is repeated multiple times) that combines thick bass, Theremin, and robot vocals. “Talisman” belongs on a movie soundtrack, be it a spy thriller, a sexy comedy, or a sci-fi film.
“Remember” has electro-beats surrounded by ghostly synths as Dunckel and Godin sing about a day in the past. You can’t tell if the day was good or bad or somewhere in between, but I think that’s the point. Ms. Hirsch returns for vocals on “You Make It Easy,” a song with bossa nova touches that tells a lovely tale of love.
“Ce Matin La” reveals Air’s love of Ennio Morricone with its harmonica riffs, subtle trumpet, and, of course, guitar work. “New Star in the Sky (Chanson pour Solal)” is a mellow head-trip and perfect for relaxing on the international space station while you’re circling the Earth every ninety minutes. “Le Voyage de Penelope” closes the album with sultry synths that almost sound like a warped trumpet at first and then become a lush groove track to send you off into euphoric bliss.
Moon Safari is perfectly named because this whole album sounds like it was made in such a place – a hidden jungle deep inside the moon ruled by sexy women and weird creatures.
Do you need to chill out? Are you looking for music for meditation, yoga, sleeping, or romance? Does your reality need a shift? Then give Cicada Wavesby Ben Seretan a spin.
The idea behind Cicada Waves is beautifully simple: Hit record, play some piano in an Appalachian Mountains dance studio, and record whatever happens with no second takes, edits, or polishes. It captures moments in time in Seretan’s life and gives them to us to experience. Ambient piano criss-crosses with sounds of rainfall, thunder, wind, cats, birds, and the titular cicadas. It was recorded in isolation yet sounds expansive. It is hypnotic yet enthralling.
“Cicada Waves 1” has the critters’ buzzing as soft drone undertone while Seretan muses away on his antique Steinway without hurry. “3pm Rainstorm” is perfect for slowing down the rush of whatever is overwhelming you. “Cicada Waves 2” seems a little melancholy compared to “Cicada Waves 1,” but it’s no less lovely. The cicadas blend into more white noise on “Rain and Cicadas” while Seretan’s piano backs them.
I meditated through most of “11pm Sudden Thunderstorm” and can tell you it was a nice experience. Seretan’s piano riffs off the rain and thunder quite well. His piano work on “8pm Crickets” is a bit more playful and active, surely inspired by the insect chorus outside the studio. “Fog Rolls out Rabun Gap” moves as easily out of your speakers or earbuds as its namesake.
It’s a lovely record that you’ll want for many moods, travels, and situations. I wouldn’t listen to it while driving, however. It might lull you into a dreamland across the centerline or into a ditch. Play it at the rest stop while you take a power nap during a long trip. Open the window while you play it and you won’t be sure where the album ends and nature begins.
Keep your mind open.
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Today, percussionist and electronic producer Booker Stardrum announced his third album CRATER will release July 2 via NNA Tapes. Along with the announcement, Stardrum has shared “Diorama” — a texturally rich and rhythmically dense sound sculpture.
CRATER is the sum of countless dynamic, highly active, moving components. Not just percussive phrases, but melodies, textures, sound, noise, and the cracks and crevices of vacant space between these bodies. Stardrum’s creative approach is a multi-tiered process — ideas discovered during improvisation feed into live performances, which then fuel compositional concepts, cycling back and forth until the final arrangements emerge.
As with the majority of Stardrum’s works, percussion is the epicenter, the nucleus from which all else grows. But the music splinters off and transforms from there, growing and evolving into the distinctive final form that is Stardrum’s solo work. Melody plays a prominent role as well, but it’s journey feels dictated and influenced by the unpredictability and spontaneous, human fluidity of the percussive action.
Another important piece of Stardrum’s process is collaboration. Both inspiration and sounds were provided in varying capacities by Stardrum’s musical peers and close friends, whether they performed in-studio, or provided the artist with source material to then be sampled and processed into the structure of the tracks. The foundation of CRATER was recorded in-studio with long-time collaborative partner John Dieterich (Deerhoof), who also handled the final mixes and mastering. These recordings were then further dissected by Stardrum in a solitary headspace through digital editing processes, eventually revealing the nine individual pieces that make up the album.
A sustained tension carries the listener from track to track, which plays out like a narrative structure using a purely sonic language. The result is an overall sound that feels expansive and immersive, where the listener can truly feel held and embraced inside the music that Stardrum has created. Through deep listening, one can feel contained in this sound world, with enough dimensionality inside to move around freely and explore one’s surroundings.
Read the full bio and pre-order CRATER from NNA Tapes here.
Keep your mind open.
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[Thanks to NNA Tapes and Cody at Clandestine Label Services.]
Throwing Snow, a.k.a. Ross Tones, will release his new album Dragons on June 25th via Houndstooth. Today he’s sharing the first single from the record, “Brujita“. Speaking about the track, Throwing Snow said “‘Brujita’ is about the breaking of aural tradition and the suppression of cunning women and men. It’s a eulogy to lost folk wisdom.”
Throwing Snow’s fourth album is the audiovisually-augmented Dragons, a work that occupies the space between science and ancestral wisdom. It links music back to its prehistoric capacity for transmitting knowledge to new technology that can untangle the complexity of the contemporary world. Dragons’ ten tracks of heavy primal rhythmic productions incorporate the physicality of acoustic sources, from ancient ritual instruments to modern drum kit, and each track is accompanied by visuals generated by a neural network.
Throwing Snow, aka Ross Tones, developed Dragons’ neural network with artist, designer and technologist Matt Woodham. The structures and changes in Tones’ music trigger corresponding changes in accompanying moving images, which combine life in three scales, from microscopic views of rocks to large scale maps. “Everything that happens musically triggers the algorithm to do something,” Tones explains. “This isn’t controlled or predictable, and the music becomes an instruction for the algorithm to make its own decisions about datasets, images, speed, movement and other manipulations.”
The tracks on Dragons match Tones’s ambitions for the album in weight but not complexity. They are intentionally dazzlingly simple in their means, for maximum effect, with repeating motifs, locked basslines, cosmic patterns and full-frequency mids. Often built from four or fewer elements, Tones allows sound to accumulate into his unique take on ritual music for the 21st century. Throbbing ritual dances contain half-remembered earworms revealing glittering night skies of synthesizer patterns – ‘Halos’ stabs and stutters like a dance atop a longbarrow; ‘Purr’ reverberates in silky vibrational motifs; the heavyweight ‘Brujita’ is nu-metal for a past-future ceremony of uncertain purpose.
Tones says he often uses his music as allegory and container for the concepts and theories he’s immersed in – he studied astrophysics, and is fascinated by crafts, archeoacoutics, history, evolution and psychology. In Dragons, he wanted to explore the purpose of music from the beginning of human history. “We have Palaeolithic minds but find ourselves in an increasingly complex and interconnected world,” Tones explains. “Music and art have always been ritualised as a tool for memory, knowledge and emotion, and humans make sense of existence by using tools. Songs were tools of understanding, passed down from our ancestors. Now, things are complex and interrelated, so we can’t use that ancestral knowledge, and need to invent new tools – that’s where machine learning comes into it.”
As is typical for Tones’ Throwing Snow project, the album contains a bold and eclectic mix of instruments, from a bodhrán and daf to cello, with their uses rooted in their inherent acoustic properties. Tones also essentially built his own sample pack for the percussion patterns, working with drummer Jack Baker (Bonobo, Kelis, Alice Russell, Planet Battagon) on an intensive two-day session.
Tones is a Houndstooth stalwart, and Dragons is his fourth full-length album on the label, along with a string of 12”s and EPs. His first album was Mosaic in 2014, followed by Embers in 2017, and Loma in 2018. Originally from the North Of England, for the last few years he has worked from The Castle, his studio an hour outside Bristol/Bath, where he can both forage his own food and find the headspace to make music and experiment with modern technology. He is currently recording a new album with his trio Snow Ghosts, and a soundtrack for a Netflix documentary.
Dragons is a new form of inter-disciplinary album, which is neither wholly electronic nor acoustic, sonic or visual, and pulls from an equally diverse range of inspirations, from texts such as Steven Mithin’s The Singing Neanderthals and Margo Neale and Lynn Kell’s Songlines to the 1982 animated film Flight of Dragons. “I’m into putting music back into history,” Tones explains. “I want to make you think about what music is, what its purpose has been. I’m asking about the scientific aspect to folklore and ancient knowledge, and looking at why it’s still useful. This album is a doorway – if you choose to listen like that.”
International Anthem announces a new Carlos Niño & Friends album, More Energy Fields, Current (out on digital music platforms May 7th, in stores on LP/CD June 25th), and share the lead single “Pleasewakeupalittlefaster, please…” (featuring Jamael Dean). More Energy Fields, Current is a definitive new peak in the recorded continuum of Niño, a prolific producer, percussionist, and self-identified “Communicator.” Featuring heavy contributions from many of the most exciting instrumentalists in the creative music constellation of Los Angeles (of which Niño has been a central force for over two decades) including Dean, Nate Mercereau, Sam Gendel, and Jamire Williams, the album collects ten pristine gems of collaborative communication helmed by Niño, elegantly presented in his unique “Spiritual, Improvisational, Space Collage” style.
Lead single (and album opener) “Pleasewakeupalittlefaster, please…” articulates an Earth-loving, universalist ethos that imbues the entire 44-minute program, and comes accompanied by liner notes from Niño: “We’re all in this together. I look forward to living in a much higher, much more conscious, harmonious state, here, with You, on this Magical Planet Earth.” The track also features a gorgeously-keyed canonic infinity by pianist Jamael Dean. “I first met Carlos when I was in high school,” says Dean. “I was playing at The Del Monte Speakeasy in Venice around that time. Carlos invited me to play every month with my own band. It gave me an opportunity to try out a lot of new music with my homies. ‘Pleasewakeupalittlefaster, please’ came from an idea Carlos asked me to play, at one of his concerts. I played it again over the track he sent me, when I went back to New York because of College. I remember talking to Carlos about all the misconceptions about the history of music and the importance of proper education.”
More Energy Fields, Current is ripe with ambient passages that function like open portals between moments of consonance and clarity. But even in the occasional absence of drums, there is a powerful pulse implicit in the program’s frequency of consciousness. It’s a testament to Niño’s foundations as a DJ. His distinct ability to craft kinetic, cinematic sonic experiences from dozens of independent, often rhythmically-ambiguous improvisational archive memories is more fluently displayed on More Energy Fields, Current than anything we’ve heard from him to date. It resonates, lucidly, with the way Niño’s mentor Iasos – who is known to the world as an original founder of New Age music – has described his work: “Real Time Interactive Imagination, Flow Texturization.”
More Energy Fields, Current Tracklist: 01. Pleasewakeupalittlefaster, please… (with Jamael Dean) 02. The World Stage, 4321 Degnan Boulevard, Los Angeles California 90008 (with Sam Gendel, Jamael Dean and Randy Gloss) 03. Nightswimming (with Dntel, Jamael Dean and Jira ><) 04. Now the background is the foreground. (with Adam Rudolph, Aaron Shaw and Jamael Dean) 05. Thanking The Earth (with Sam Gendel and Nate Mercereau) 06. Salon Winds (with Jamire Williams, Nate Mercereau, Jamael Dean and Aaron Shaw) 07. Ripples, Reflection, Loop (with Laraaji, Jamael Dean and Sharada) 08. Togetherness (with Devin Daniels and Jamael Dean) 09. Iasos 79 ‘til Infinity 10. Please, wake up.
There are many albums that convey a sense of place. Sometimes the place is an entire town or nation, other times it’s a small bedroom. Nick Schofield‘s excellent new ambient music album, Glass Gallery, conveys the energy of part of Ottawa’s National Gallery of Canada. The gallery is full of high ceilings and massive windows, creating a space full of light, air, and meditative quiet.
“Central Atrium” immediately puts you into the right headspace for the record with its warm synths and simple, relaxing chords. Listening to “Mirror Image” is like listening to a prism with light shining through it. I’m not sure I can describe it better than that. “Getty Garden” blips and bleeps like a happy robotic cat. “Water Court” seemingly drifts along without effort, and “Molinarism” sounds like the theme to a Blade Runner spin-off TV show.
“Travertine Museum” and “Snow Blue Square” are luxurious meditations. “Ambient Architect” is a good way to describe Schofield himself, as the song weaves intricate yet relaxing patterns of synth chords over and through each other. “Garden Court is a nice compliment to “Water Court.” “Kissing Wall” is as intriguing as its namesake and a perfect song for androids who want to make out, with humans or other synthetic beings. The album ends with the subtle, but no less hypnotizing, “Key of Klee.”
What makes this album even more impressive is when you consider it was made with just one synthesizer – a Sequential Circuits Prophet-600. I couldn’t make this with ten synthesizers if he, Gary Numan, and Giorgio Moroder were coaching me. It’s a lovely piece of work.
Keep your mind open.
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[Thanks to Gabriel at Clandestine Label Services.]
