Up next for Mush Records is a curve ball for the label and the artist providing the release that begs the question in my mind: "did Mush know ahead of time that the new Neotropic record would be a radical stylistic departure?" Neotropic's Riz Maslen is responsible for some of the best and most overlooked electronica releases of the last decade on labels like NTone and Bip-Hop, and she's ever flirted with the intersection of the acoustic and synthetic in a way that gives her records depth and repeated playability. Still, I've been an off-and-on fan, loving 15 Levels of Magnification, being a little less enthused about Mr. Brubaker's Strawberry Alarm Clock but then being reeled back in for the beautiful ambience and found sound of La Prochaine Fois. I naturally expected that a Neotropic release on Mush, the current US equivalent to the once-dominant Ninja Tune would be an exquisite slice of mellow beats and organic electronica. How wrong I was! I experienced the new record first in a live setting, which was entirely unsettling as Maslen was joined onstage by a full band playing a kind of psychadelic jam-bandy sort of trip-rock. It was groovy and fun, but not at all what I or anyone really expected in the midst of the Mush show, and from an artist best known for her subtle digital work. As it turns out, the record is a much richer and more layered document of the kind of pastoral psych-folk that Neotropic was playing out live. The album is full of highly produced instrumentation, drums filtered and massaged through the machines that Maslen commands, and is every bit the live and organic experience that the concert provided, but with the added depth of careful studio work to give everything more character. There are subtle bubbling synths, location recordings and acoustic guitar all serving to back the playful, free-floating singing and humming that characterizes parts of the record. I never expected to hear harmonica solos on a Neotropic record, and yet it works with a kind of funky ease that is vaguely spiritual, certainly trippy, and just far enough left of center to keep it interesting. The album ends with a quiet track of noodling, then a large space of silence followed by a hidden track of space rock that would almost make fans of desert music proud. The guitars are fuzzed out and sitting high in the mix, with a groovy backbeat and swarms of acid-washed noise and digital artifacts as accompaniment. It's not the way I would have imagined the new Neotropic winding down, but it's a momentary diversion and release and it works despite the context. samples:
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