There have been a whole bunch upon a whole bunch of ambient music albums launched this 12 months, however there’s just one launched by an elite-tier rapper with a 13-times-Platinum file underneath his overalls. Within the 16 years because the tectonic-shifting Outkast went on hiatus, followers of the duo’s André 3000 have been clamoring for the celebrity to ship one thing greater than the occasional knockout visitor verse. As an alternative, he’s been following his arrow as a nomadic, bohemian troubadour enjoying his flute in airports, espresso outlets, sidewalks and yoga lessons. His debut album, New Blue Solar is the total blossom of his middle-aged slide into light drones and minimalist reedwork. Followers have been justifiably cautious about an album bearing the sticker “Warning: No Bars” and song-titles like “I Swear, I Actually Wished to Make a ‘Rap’ Album however This Is Actually the Manner the Wind Blew Me This Time.” Fortunately, André 3000’s 87-minute ambient music odyssey is a beautiful, deeply modern, prismatic breath of recent incense.
New Blue Solar additionally marks a peak within the decade-long crescendo of hipsterati new age revival. Within the early 2010s, tastemaking reissue labels like Numero Group, Mild within the Attic and Rvng Intl. started re-issuing non-public press American new age music, liberating a once-derided style from a fame as crystals-and-wind-chimes uncoolness and repositioning it as an American people custom brimming with D.I.Y. vitality. Labels like Empire of Indicators and Switzerland’s WRWTFWW have turned their consideration to reenergizing the extra gaseous, electronic-minded ambient music of Japan, which you might be able to hear in New Blue Solar‘s extra artificial moments. Alanis Morrisette, Moby, 6lack, Sufjan Stevens and even actor Jeff Bridges have had varied levels of success with the therapeutic music over the previous couple of years.
For its half, New Blue Solar is most of a chunk with scrappy, prolific Los Angeles cassette tape label Leaving Data, an imprint that additionally exists on the intersection of ambient, new age, jazz, improv and experimental digital music. A lot of the Leaving roster —Matthewdavid, Carlos Niño, Deantoni Parks, V.C.R — are available to help and praise André’s melodies, increasing his biking curlicues of digital flute right into a communal bouillabaisse of swelling cymbals and alien glitter.
Although the press supplies hyperlink New Blue Solar to the natural minimalism of Laraaji and the non secular jazz of Alice Coltrane, in apply it’s extra just like the dreamy, semi-organic “fourth world” music of composers like Jon Hassell and Steve Roach: imagined landscapes the place cosmic electronics euphorically tangle with varied shakers, reeds and rainsticks. André’s “digital reed instrument” evokes the late-Eighties uncanny valley soundworlds of Japanese composers like Yoshio Ojima — not completely actual, not completely pretend, completely transfixing. New Blue Solar is under no circumstances affected person or minimal. Andre’s crew as an alternative works collectively like a dynamic dwell band that offers in delicate tones and delicate moods whether or not using a groove (That Evening in Hawaii…”), swelling into waterfalls of comfortable chaos (“BuyPoloDisorder’s Daughter…”) or creating rainforests of sound (“Ants to You…”). Our bandleader has a wayfaring meander that dances in percussive bursts whereas his fellow gamers burble, simmer and sparkle. All these shifting elements imply it’s not precisely probably the most immersive setting for these in search of “calming” or “therapeutic” music. Nonetheless, when approached because the product of a tape-label basement jazz group or a subterranean digital ensemble, New Blue Solar is an absolute pleasure.
New Blue Solar will not be the most effective ambient file you may hear in 2023. It’s slight when positioned subsequent to the confrontational gush of Tim Hecker’s No Highs, the fragile vulnerability of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s 12, the pastoral zones of Takashi Kokubo & Andrea Esperti’s Music for a Cosmic Backyard or the enveloping heat of Loscil/Lawrence English’s Colors of Air. Nonetheless, New Blue Solar will most likely be the solely ambient file many individuals do hear in 2023, and it’s nice that such a full of life, luxurious album will get the gig. Identical to along with his game-changing rap group, André 3000 is as soon as once more enjoying Pied Piper, and a world of sound awaits those that comply with with open ears and open minds.