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Following the release of her critically acclaimed new album Forest City, Maria Chiara Argirò (pronounced ma-REE-ah key-AH-rah r-gee-ROW)
announces a remix package of some of the album's highlights. First up is the reworking of "Clouds" by Atlanta's electronic funk wizard Byron the Aquarius who has given the ethereal vocal track a dancefloor treatment showcasing their love of classic Chicago & Detroit House.
Byron the Aquarius has worked with the likes of Jeff Mills, Kyle Hall & Theo Parrish's Sound Signature label.
After quietly weaving her way around the UK jazz, classical and electronic worlds Maria has cemented herself as a key player in the capital’s multi-national jazz scene. Maria has released a few solo and collaborative records (Flow was The Guardian’s jazz album of the month and nominated as album of the year in the Jazz Revelations Awards), but on her latest album Forest City it feels like the turning of a page as she liberates herself from the structures of jazz.
On Forest City, Maria found a glistening thread between these movements: where jazz meets Kelly Lee Owens, Jon Hopkins and Radiohead. It’s a concept record, about the “duality of nature and city”, where organic sounds and textures seem to flow above the urban sprawl.
Stay tuned for more Forest City remixes and brand new material from Maria Chiara Argirò.
Jimmy Edgar has just shared his new album LIQUIDS HEAVEN. On a surface level, it is a starburst of avant-garde fusion, collecting a diverse cast of eccentric geniuses and re-configuring them into a psychedelic canvas of future R&B, euphoric bass, mutant tear-the-club-up rap, foundation-splintering noise, and gossamer soul. But as with all his work, there is a deeper and subversive intent.
LIQUIDS HEAVEN’s early gestation spawned from Edgar’s explorations of “material” in the digital world, and is part of his broader ambition to change belief and intention in the digital realm – a pseudo-invisible way to summon novel realities by infusing his ultra-sleek aesthetic into transformative conceptual art. LIQUIDS HEAVEN is the ultimate culmination of the idea of “phases of matter.”
LIQUIDS HEAVEN is not merely a technicolor dream of ethereal abstractions, however. It bangs as hard as anything to ever bump from a subwoofer. But for all the high energy propulsion, there is a counter-balance of melancholic beauty, and in a career of fascinating left-turns, it would be more surprising if LIQUIDS HEAVEN wasn’t surprising. The genius of it is that for all its cerebral intent, it remains replete with raw and visceral emotion. Out of sadness comes courage. Water, liquid, and light evaporate, become transparent, disappear peacefully. Nothing less than the sound and look of liquid are transmuted into powerful new sculptures – which are best experienced at a high volume on the far side of the sky.
Signed to Warp Records as a teenage electronic music prodigy, Edgar has recorded for the world’s most respected imprints (Warp, K7, Hotflush and his own New Reality Now). Raised in Detroit, with stints in Berlin, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and New York, his list of close collaborators includes Hudson Mohawke, Danny Brown, SOPHIE, DAWN, Mykki Blanco, Vince Staples, and Machinedrum (as one half of their duo J-E-T-S).
Read more about the project on FADER.
LIQUIDS HEAVEN Track Listing
1 - EUPHORIA (FT LIZY2K)
2 - EVERYBODY (FT 10KCAASH & ZELOOPERZ)
3 - DREAMS 1000000 (FT MILK)
4 - SLIP N SLIDE
5 - BITE THAT 2 (FT TRINIDAD JAMES)
6 - SIDEROOM
7 - BUNNY LAVA (FT VIRGEN MARIA)
8 - NO ANTIDOTE (FT RIPPARCHIE)
9 - STATIC (FT BANSHEE)
10 - YA! (FT 645AR)
11 - NEVER LEAVE (FT MILK)
The musical force known as BAMBII returns to share a brand new single in "RIDE WITH ME." Fully written and produced by BAMBII, the track marks her debut singing on one of her own productions with additional vocals from Tempest featured on the hook. Fusing her Jamaican roots with a worldly sound influenced by Toronto's multiculturalism, "RIDE WITH ME" is a rave love story and an emotional club banger that is a collision of hyper-pop, drill, and breakbeats featuring BAMBII on production and vocal duties.
The new track arrives following BAMBII's recent co-production on Kelela's latest single "Happy Ending" and her pair of 2021 EPs TWITCH and TRUCK RIDDIM. The EPs featured original instrumental versions of their title-tracks as well as additional remixes. Following an extended stay in Jamaica during the Covid-19 lockdown, TRUCK RIDDIM was BAMBII's first release since 2019's "NITEVISION" feat. Pamputtae.
Whether online or on dancefloors, BAMBII's political and musical vernacular give credence to dance music's ever expanding reach, the relationships it helps forge between individuals, cultures and spaces.
Click here for a link to the new single.
Hiroshima-born, Montreal-based singer-songwriter Jonah Yano shares his new single and video "portrait of a dog," the title track of his forthcoming sophomore album entirely co-produced with BADBADNOTGOOD, out January 27th. The new offering arrives on the heels of Yano's stint supporting Clairo for the last leg of her North American and the entirety of her European tour dates, which wrapped up last month. He also closed the live run with a headline show of his own at Servant Jazz Quarters in London. "portrait of a dog" is a sweeping arrangement that finds Jonah gliding over keys and guitar with heartfelt vocals before the song swells into a winding guitar solo, and is accompanied by a video co-directed by Erin O'Connor, Matisse A-M and Kostadin Kolev.
Speaking on the continued theme of the visuals he's released so far, Yano says "'portrait of a dog' is a video that, like the most recent video for the song ‘always’, is made up of uninterrupted, continuous, and static shots. The thinking behind the monotonous visual information in these new videos comes from a disinterest in the ever-increasing over-saturation and pace of digital media surrounding musicians that is furthering the divide between musicians-as-artists and musicians-as-commodity."
The collaborators, Erin O’Connor, Matisse A-M, and Kostadin Kolev ('portrait of a dog'), and Nik Arthur and David May ('always'), were the directors and producers of these videos because I feel they understand why it might be interesting (and surprisingly challenging) to try and make a music video that did not grab and attempt to retain the attention of a viewer through brightly colored sets and a large amount of cutting back and forth between an array of visually stimulating shots. In trying to subtract most of the elements that exist in the average music video we found it crucial that the idea for the video at its core had to be strong enough to stand on its own for 5 straight minutes – to get the idea across without making a pointless video."
"portrait of a dog includes the previously-released singles "leslianne," "always," and "the speed of sound!," which is at the confluence of his love of folk and jazz music.
It’s a focused departure from Yano’s previous recordings – establishing a clear sonic identity throughout the album’s 12 songs to weave together two complementary narrative threads of a family archive and exploration of the family dynamics in the Japanese-Canadian household he grew up in, and a deeply personal recollection of a fading relationship. Beyond the co-production of BADBADNOTGOOD, "portrait of a dog" features additional guest work from Slauson Malone, Sea Oleena, with string arrangements by Eliza Niemi, Leland Whitty, and Yano himself. Yano's forthcoming second album follows his cover of Jessica Pratt’s "This Time Around" and his highly acclaimed 2020 debut LP souvenir, which he spoke about with Lulu Garcia-Navarro on NPR's Weekend Edition.