Welcome to Four Things #30. Thanks so much for the great feedback on the last Things, I always appreciate your thoughts, comments and observations! Received a bunch of recommendations and articles about enjoying slowed down / pitched down music (in response to the bit about Fracture’s Slow Astro mixes) so I’ll probably return to that subject in another letter.
A slightly different ‘Things’ today; I was talking with a friend about Andre3000’s new album “New Blue Sun” and those thoughts turned into some notes, which then turned into a small essay which you will find below. I will definitely be sticking to the usual format of Four Things but perhaps I can use the ‘Stack for some slightly longer pieces as well. We’ll see!
Feel free to pass on the link to your friends, and check out my newsletter archive if you haven’t done so before. Wishing you love and health..
Martyn
Nov 21st, 2023
NEW BLUE SUN
Sometimes when you engage with a new piece of music on an intimate level, it takes a little bit of time before you’ve figured out what to think of it or what you felt after listening to it. You may want to hold back on telling friends about your experience, or write about it, as it almost feels like you need to have a little more time with the piece before sending your opinion out into the world. This is why I sometimes don’t understand how under the time pressure of a release schedule or a print deadline a professional music reviewer is able to shape their thoughts so quickly, especially for records that feel like they are going to have a very long lasting impact. One such record is Andre3000’s ‘New Blue Sun’ with which I sat for a while last weekend.
In the interview Andre did for GQ about his album he said something amazing - While making the record he was trying to rekindle the initial, almost naive joy and resourcefulness a music maker has when experimenting, when you don’t quite know what you’re looking for but immensely enjoying the journey rather than where it will eventually lead you. By taking on something that you are a novice at (the flute in this case) instead of an expert (rap) you can use an almost baby-like curiosity to create without any inhibitions about the end result.
This is a spark a lot of musicians are looking for when their craft gets clouded by both internal and external blocks and pressures. I can imagine it can take several years to make a clean break with the external pressures of fans to satisfy and a label with certain expectations and schedules, before you can sit down and create with an empty slate. And that’s just the easy part! The internal, mental side of things can be clouded with doubts about your own ability to stay fresh, to still enjoy the act of music-making when your career depends on it, and to call up the creativity that’s needed to make something you’re excited about, not just something that hits all the markers set by previous work. Sometimes you need to break it all down to build something new on top - in that regard before having even listened to the new Andre3000 record you can already call it a success.
As for the music itself; the record is a really intricate collection of stream of consciousness type pieces that play off of repetitive themes and phrases, with sounds and adlibs floating in and out. I thought it felt a bit little lazy for reviewers and commenters to immediately lump this in with classic Spiritual Jazz works by Alice Coltrane or Pharoah Sanders, just because the music takes its time, is arranged in a different way and has people playing percussion on it doesn’t make it Spiritual Jazz. Coltrane and Sanders may use similar frameworks, but are also known for much, much greater dynamics, intensity and story telling, not to mention way, way more mastery of their instruments. Maybe there’s a similarity between Shabaka Hutchings and Andre in the sense that they are both searchers, journeymen, looking for reed instrument timbres and new ways to incorporate them into their practice - but again - Shabaka is a whole different order of virtuosity.
That said, Andre3000 does something on this record that’s much more akin to another music great: J Dilla. The simple reed and Rhodes phrases on “That Night in Hawaii…” for instance, are played, then sampled and replayed at different pitches to create variations and add more layers and textures. He does something similar on other tracks, in the way he treats sampled chords that are transposed to a lower pitch, which creates interesting new harmonics and make the sound more ‘unstable’ or ‘fragile’. Slowed down phrases also provide interesting transitions between notes that sound a lot more loose than the original. A good example of this is the Herbie Hancock piano sample in Mobb Deep’s “Shook Ones pt II”.
In his book “Dilla Time”, Dan Charnas has also written about this extensively, providing examples from J Dilla beats where this technique has been used to great success. In interviews Andre3000 has mentioned several times how he was interested in beatmaking, and a great example of that can be found on Outkast’s “Speakerboxx/The Love Below” in the cover of Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things”. So even though there’s a two decade gap between that and “New Blue Sun”, the new record sounds like a beat creator’s ambient album, basically a hiphop album.. but without beats.. and without vocals.
My last observation when listening to the pieces on the album, has to do with the way (percussion) sounds drop in and out, almost as 'accents' to the continuously developing riffs, like adlibs. It reminded me of mid 90’s ambient albums - especially the very sample heavy works of The Orb and Future Sound of London. This school of UK producers treated music pieces more as sound collages rather than melody focused tracks/songs. The collages play with ideas of harmony and dissonance, and a specific pacing of sounds rather what notes are played exactly. Just listen to something like Future Sound of London’s “Cerebral” off of their “Lifeforms” LP, or the entire “ISDN” album for that matter. You can sense a similar pacing to the Andre3000 pieces. Another one of my favorites is the mellow “Spanish Castles in Space” by The Orb, or the slightly more uptempo “Pomme Fritz” from the album of the same title. Now of course, there have been musicians employing sound collage techniques (long) before this particular wave of electronic artists, but these two jump to mind as the blueprints of my musical memory were obviously shaped in the time period these artists were most prolific.
As I said earlier, sometimes you want to sit with a piece of music a little bit longer to form real opinions about it, and the slightly more musicological observations above are just that.. Observations.. The one thing that “New Blue Sun” provided when I listened to it over the weekend though, was a break. A break from the daily barrage of awful news, a break from social media and black friday emails, a brief moment where the music lifted me up high above ground, and had me looking down and gain some perspective. I think we can all use a moment like that.
Would love to hear your thoughts and comments, I promise a complete Four Things will be coming soon! Thanks for reading.
Martyn
ps: My friend Chris Richards from Washington Post had a nice review of the Andre record, read that here: Andre3000’s new flute album is for real
ps2: Musa Okwonga had some beautifully ethereal thoughts about it too:
Still haven't had a chance to sit down with this one yet but I found your observation that this is like a beat-maker's approach to ambient, complete with Dilla-style constructions, to be really interesting! Will keep that in mind when I listen.