Once again you can only call it overwhelming — Carlos Niño's staggering work here leads the era, or rather sums up the entire current flowing out of West Coast hippie culture. This release features three musicians who essentially served as the backing band on André 3000's "New Blue Sun," personally one of my favorite records of last year. A major hip-hop artist putting out a new age album like that was Black spiritualism in progress, and the fixer behind it was, of course, Carlos Niño.
Surya Botofasina is a keyboardist who grew up listening to Alice Coltrane play piano and synth (!). Nate Mercereau is another West Coast maverick — a Carlos regular who also moves in major-label circles — sampling the band live while playing: taking, say, Carlos's percussion from 30 seconds earlier and replaying it in a new key and tempo, or rapidly slicing Surya's keyboard pads and pitching them down into sub frequencies, reconstructing moments of sound within the sound. The three came together at the home recording studio of Turn On The Sunlight's Jesse Peterson and Mia Doi Todd in Glendale, California, which tells you just how tight the West Coast/Leaving community is. A record that transcends jazz or ambient and feels more like a natural phenomenon. Incredible. (Original Japanese text by Shhhhh)