The state of minds are mild, the tones are soft. ‘New Blue Sun’ is an 87-minute sound world you’ll enjoy getting lost in
There have actually been hundreds upon numerous ambient music albums launched this year, however there’s just one launched by an elite-tier rap artist with a 13-times-Platinum record under his overalls. In the 16 years because the tectonic-shifting Outkast went on hiatus, fans of the duo’s André 3000 have actually been demanding the super star to provide something more than the periodic knockout visitor verse. Rather, he’s been following his arrow as a nomadic, bohemian troubadour playing his flute in airports, cafe, pathways and yoga classes. His launching album, New Blue Sun is the complete bloom of his middle-aged slide into mild drones and minimalist reedwork. Fans have actually been justifiably mindful about an album bearing the sticker label “Warning: No Bars” and song-titles like “I Swear, I Really Wanted to Make a ‘Rap’ Album however This Is Literally the Way the Wind Blew Me This Time.” Fortunately, André 3000’s 87-minute ambient music odyssey is a stunning, deeply modern, prismatic breath of fresh incense.
New Blue Sun Marks a peak in the decade-long crescendo of hipsterati brand-new age revival. In the early 2010s, tastemaking reissue labels like Numero Group, Light in the Attic and Rvng Intl. started re-issuing personal press American brand-new age music, releasing a once-derided category from a credibility as crystals-and-wind-chimes uncoolness and rearranging it as an American folk custom teeming with D.I.Y. energy. Labels like Empire of Signs and Switzerland’s WRWTFWW have actually turned their attention to reenergizing the more gaseous, electronic-minded ambient music of Japan, which you might have the ability to hear in New Blue Sun‘s more artificial minutes. Alanis Morrisette, Moby, 6lack, Sufjan Stevens and even star Jeff Bridges have actually had numerous degrees of success with the recovery music over the last couple of years.
For its part, New Blue Sun is the majority of a piece with scrappy, respected Los Angeles cassette tape label Leaving Records, an imprint that likewise exists at the crossway of ambient, brand-new age, jazz, improv and speculative electronic music. Much of the Leaving lineup– Matthewdavid, Carlos Niño, Deantoni Parks, V.C.R– are on hand to help and enhance André’s tunes, broadening his biking curlicues of digital flute into a common bouillabaisse of swelling cymbals and alien shine.
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The press products connect New Blue Sun to the natural minimalism of Laraaji and the spiritual jazz of Alice Coltrane, in practice it’s more like the dreamy, semi-organic “4th world” music of authors like Jon Hassell and Steve Roach: thought of landscapes where cosmic electronic devices euphorically contend numerous shakers, reeds and rainsticks. André’s “digital reed instrument” stimulates the late-Eighties incredible valley soundworlds of Japanese authors like Yoshio Ojima– not absolutely genuine, not completely phony, completely transfixing. New Blue Sun is by no methods client or very little. Andre’s team rather interacts like a vibrant live band that handles soft tones and mild state of minds whether riding a groove (That Night in Hawaii …”), swelling into waterfalls of pleased turmoil (“BuyPoloDisorder’s Daughter …”) or developing jungles of noise (“Ants to You …”). Our bandleader has a wayfaring meander that dances in percussive bursts while his fellow gamers burble, simmer and shimmer. All these moving parts indicate it’s not precisely the most immersive environment for those looking for “soothing” or “recovery” music. When approached as the item of a tape-label basement jazz group or a below ground electronic ensemble, New Blue Sun is an outright pleasure.
New Blue Sun is not the very best ambient record you can hear in 2023. It’s small when put beside the confrontational gush of Tim Hecker’s No Highsthe fragile vulnerability of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s 12the pastoral zones of Takashi Kokubo & & Andrea Esperti’s Music for a Cosmic Garden or the covering heat of Loscil/Lawrence English’s Colours of Air New Blue Sun will most likely be the just ambient record lots of people do hear in 2023, and it’s fantastic that such a vibrant, delicious album gets the gig. Similar to with his game-changing rap group, André 3000 is when again playing Pied Piper, and a world of noise waits for those who follow with open ears and open minds.
