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French trio Mirage Club haven’t said their last word this year. Following the critically-acclaimed ‘Communication’ released a few months ago, they now return with a sumptuous single named “Tropical Z”, that comes as a foretaste of their upcoming EP.
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Long distance duo E1sbar (pronounced Ice Bear) return with a maturation of their multi-layered chill-wave sound on The Legend Of. The pair, formed in 2015, blend Frank Cueto’s sweeping musical vistas with Piper Davis’ haunting vocals. Davis is an in-demand vocalist with releases on Pamapa, Kompakt, and Anjunadeep. She has a distinctive vocal style, which in her own words; “sounds like a mixture of a woman an a prepubescent boy.” Cueto is a member of All Good Funk Alliance (AGFA), a prominenton the electronic funk scene for over two decades. Together as E1sbar, the pair are a definitively modern-day duo. Cueto and Davis have yet to meet in person despite their ongoing collaboration. A sense of distance permeates E1sbar’s sound and Davis’ day job as a flight attendant inspires examinations of her unreal reality; “I basically live on a cloud.” On The Legend Of, Cueto’s production stretches sonically across slick futurescapes with E1sbar’s usual optimism. But where the previous release Looser Futurism explored themes of adapting to a life lived off the ground, The Legend Of is written from the perspective of a post-touchdown reintegration. Davis’ lyrical trajectory is decidedly less “alone in space” and more “looking for life.” There are distinctively grounded dance grooves and more terrestrial elements like the pedal steel on title track. Other examples are the
sturdy bass line on “Star World” and the funk-tinged guitar of “Snowfall.” The sense of expanse is still there; glimmering otherworldly atmospheres resonate from track to track but the need for contact, collaboration, and humanity run through the record in a more urgent way. Real life becomes the promised ideal, followed by the recognition that, here in the future, even on the ground, it’s hard to come all the way down.
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Krystian Shek’s work is nothing if not eclectic. He’s worked out his own mode of Namlookian ‘environmental music’ across previous Carpe Sonum discs (and, prior to that, over numerous FAX editions), whether building towering edifices of stratospheric ambient or subtly shaking the foundations through an array of well-coifed beatstuffs. Navigating its way through a sensuous variety of moods, his new one prides itself on establishing a beachhead of shimmering synthetic calm amidst a clutch of frothy, downtempo sequences. Shek’s modus operandi here is restrained, tentative, almost dub-like, most pronounced in the delay-shimmer of the near four-minute “Thumbnails”, which, truth be told, could go on for another fourteen and never lose its poised, artfully crafted power. Later on, the delightful, sweet bromides laced within “Cinnamon Rolls” does much of the same thing, walking a gauzy, late-winter reverb-sheen with all the elegance Mssrs. Yayga, Grad_U, and others of similar persuasion execute. In other words, another marvelously wrought Shek-attack of pearlescent electronica, buffed with a fine shammy and shining on like crazy diamonds.
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On his full-length debut West of the West, L.A.-based songwriter/producer Goldroom bends the boundaries of electronic music to build a sleekly composed but soulful update of the quintessential California sound. “I left where I grew up and came to California with all these romantic ideas of what L.A. would be like,” says Josh Legg, a Massachusetts-born multi-instrumentalist who’s made music as Goldroom since 2011. “Over the years I’ve fallen completely in love with everything about it, even all the grit and grime, and with this album I wanted to pay homage to L.A. and how it still feels so romantic to me.”
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Though it takes its title from a Theodore Roosevelt bon mot—“When I am in California, I am not in the West, I am west of the West”—the follow-up to Goldroom’s acclaimed 2015 EP It’s Like You Never Went Away mines much inspiration from Legg’s love for the sea. “For me, ‘west of the West’ can mean the Pacific, which has become an important place for me over the last decade,” he says. A longtime sailor, Legg also notes that “a lot of my childhood memories are of me and my dad on this little tiny boat, cruising around the New England coast. I spent countless hours just sailing and listening to music, and the feeling of that experience has stayed with me really heavily over the years.” Throughout the album, Goldroom reveals his deep-rooted affinity with the ocean by sculpting expansive arrangements and instilling each song with a serene yet kinetic energy.
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That energy’s partly sourced from Goldroom’s ingenuity in interlacing live guitar, bass, and percussion into electronic soundscapes to form a sound both forward-pushing and timeless. On West of the West, he further shapes that glossy but groove-heavy sound by tapping into sensibilities of early French house music. “I don’t feel all that influenced by producers on a day-to-day basis—songwriting is what’s important to me, so I’m usually thinking about guys like Tom Petty or Curtis Mayfield—but there’s an innocence to what producers like Daft Punk and Alan Braxe do that appeals to me,” says Legg. And just as those artists show an intense fascination with the pop landscape of the early ’80s, Goldroom steeps West of the West in its own nostalgia. “I’ve always used music as an escapist device, as a way to try to get back to that feeling of when you were younger and everything was a little more pure and uncomplicated,” he points out.
On the album-opening “Silhouette,” for instance, Goldroom brilliantly channels the breezy and bass-powered feel of classic French touch music. Slow-building and warmly intimate, the song bittersweetly muses on “what it means to be far away from someone you love and feeling like part of you is missing without them,” as Legg explains.
From start to finish West of the West sustains that dreamy melancholy, a mood informed by Legg’s solo touring as a DJ in recent years. “Being alone on the road for long stretches of time is a pretty unique experience,” he says. “There’s this dual thing of loving that lifestyle of constantly being in motion, but also missing my family and my friends and feeling pulled back home. That’s definitely something I kept coming back to as I was writing for this record.” Trading off vocals with Irish singer/songwriter Rooty throughout West of the West, Goldroom brings a nuanced emotionality to songs like “Back to You” (a sweetly shimmering feel-good track), “Lying to You” (a darkly propulsive number with all the cinematic intensity of an ’80s pop gem), and “Retrograde” (a gorgeously urgent anthem driven by Rooty’s powerful vocal performance).
In creating West of the West, Goldroom aimed to “dig really deep and come up with something more honest and meaningful than what you usually see in dance music.” Aided by his graceful grasp of songcraft, that honesty manifests itself in a spirited vitality also abundant in Goldroom’s energetic live show. (Featuring a full band setup, the Goldroom live set finds Legg backed by a bassist, drummer, and fellow singer as he alternates between guitar and keys.) “It’s a lot different from older Goldroom stuff, where my primary concern was whether or not the song was going to work on a dance floor,” Legg adds in reflecting on West of the West.
Debuting with the Angeles EP in 2011, Goldroom emerged soon after the dissolution of Legg’s former band NightWaves. “I’d been writing all these songs but had no outlet for them, so people suggested I start a solo thing,” recalls Legg, who borrowed the name Goldroom from a dive bar in Echo Park (“a good place to get drunk and find answers to all of life’s hardest questions”). Though Goldroom was born from his then-burgeoning infatuation with the electronic world, the project drew closely from Legg’s near-lifelong experience in making music. Raised in Wellesley, Massachusetts, he learned to play cello and guitar as a child and soon started writing his own songs and self-recording on a four-track. At age 15 he had a major musical awakening while teaching sailing on Cape Cod, where a group of college kids turned him on to the ’60s/’70s rock and folk artists who would eventually guide his own songwriting. After heading off to study at the University of Southern California, Legg discovered Air, Daft Punk, and other electronic artists whose music “made me feel things I didn’t know that I could feel.” He then began his journey toward crafting boldly inventive electronic music with a classic-pop songwriting structure at its core.
For Goldroom, the main thrill of West of the West is his success in “making a record where I could sit down with an acoustic guitar, play the album all the way through, and still make it work.” But while each song is strong enough to stand unadorned, West of the West’s lush and luminous production ultimately lends the album an even greater emotional depth. “There’s something really incredible about beautiful chords being played using a stack of nicely tuned synthesizers,” Legg says in discussing his passion for electronic music. “And with a drum machine, you can make a kick-drum sound that’s more impactful than any real kick drum. There’s a whole world out there with electronic music, and the thing that gets me most excited as a musician is finding new ways to paint with those palettes while still telling a very human story.”
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“Determined by chance, whim or impulse, and not by necessity, reason or principle.” Our music tries to embody the spirit of free thinking.
Coming from different musical backgrounds, we try to create our very own style that borrows from classic, jazz, hip-hop and electronic. What we want to achieve with the project is music that isn’t born of imperatives, but of possibilities.