Michael Upton (Jet Jaguar)
I'm so glad I gave this a few goes! Despite being into all three producers involved in this collaboration, it didn't click with me for a good six months. Since then I've been thrashing it!
Favorite track: Night Squirrel.
Ryan
As a fluid tapestry of talent and evolving textures, an emotional power is formed through the seamless connection of these contrasts. One of the albums of the year.
Favorite track: Lauren iii.
Brin (Colin Blanton, with releases on Leaving Records), Dntel (aka Jimmy Tamborello, a forebearer of social distance collaboration), and More Eaze (Mari Rubio) present Futurangelics, the next installment in Cached’s ongoing social distance collaboration series. The three artists, all pioneering their own versions of forward looking electronic music in their own works, mesh into a seamless, gauzy, and expressive trio here; a mysterious palimpsest of amorphous, curious, introspective, and masterfully arranged sounds and musical motifs. The collection feels cinematic; this term usually connotes something sweeping, grandiose… instead of grandiosity we are shown a film full of subtle emotional negotiation, longing and release, mundane landscapes shrouded in purple night and light pollution. Like laying in bed at 4am thumbing back through a camera roll of blurry photographs from a night out with friends. Warm synth timbers grip onto the surfaces of gravely field recordings and parking lot stripes. Vocoded voices are draped through clattering digital percussion expressions, jittery glitches, and processed acoustic guitar. Modular percolations and warm wide pads color the humid post-meridian scene with burgundy light. Bugs clatter around a street light caught in the radiance of a swirling violin movement and a puff of cigarette smoke.
Futurangelics showcases three musicians, all accomplished and respectively unique, congealing as a trio to create something subdued, but in that subtlety deeply rewarding, almost loyal. It feels familiar, but like a friend that has gone away and finally come back to hang again, full of secrets. A world of lights glaring on the windshield as the car glides through the pre-dawn tenderness. For fans of these respective artists, you will find their signatures (cascading microsamples, enveloping synthesis, misty ambient/pop) peppered throughout, but it is those moments where you can’t tell whose hand you’re holding that become the most exhilarating. In those mysteries there is a very peculiar and enchanting softness.
credits
released April 2, 2021
brin
norns, computer, samples, percussion, dexed, vocals, field recordings
dntel
computer, modular synth, OB-6
more eaze
vocals, computer, modular synth, korg electribe, guitar, violin, field recordings
I always tell people that recommend me jazz that I don't like jazz, but this album showed me that that is an utter lie. Apparently I love jazz, and this album made me realise it. Evert
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