Tag: Innovative Leisure

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: JOVM Mainstays L’Eclair Team Up with Pink Slifu on Jazzy “REPLICA M001”

With recorded output that includes 2018’s full-length debut, Polymood, 2019’s Sauropoda, 2020’s Noshtta EP and 2021’s Confusions, the acclaimed Swiss-based group L’Eclair, founded and led by Bulgarian-born siblings Stef and Yavov Lilov firmly established themselves as masters of mind-bending, cosmic-leaning groove.

Along with two live sessions for KEXP, which amassed over 900,000 views combined, the Swiss-based group have built up an international following, while landing on the playlists of adventurous listeners and DJs seeking deep grooves. 

The acclaimed JOVM mainstays, highly-anticipated fourth album Cloud Drifter is slated for a June 20, 2025 release through Innovative Leisure. Meticulously crafted over the last four years, Cloud Drifter is a decided and radical departure from the group’s long-held instrumental approach, with teh album’s material featuring vocals from a wide and eclectic array of frequent collaborators that they’ve worked with over the past handful of years, including Pink Slifu, Girl Named GOLDEN, Gelli Haha, A Ghost Column, and more. 

Having toured with The Cinematic Orchestra and W.I.T.C.H. — including writing and recording W.I.T.C.H.’s 2023 effort Zango and The Cinematic Orchestra’s forthcoming album this year, as well as production work with Varnish La Piscine and Maston, the Lilov brothers have assembled a vast network of likeminded musicians. And across the entire album, they keenly curate a cohesive vision incorporating many disparate contributions. 

In the lead-up to Cloud Drifter‘s release later this month, I’ve written about two of the album’s previously released singles:

  • “ODESSOS,” which featured Phoebe Coco‘s and A Ghost Column’s ethereal vocals paired with twinkling and oscillating synths and a dub-inspired motorik groove. While being one of the most club friendly songs the acclaimed Swiss outfit has ever released, “ODESSOS” is a bold, sonic left turn that retains the group’s long-held penchant for crafting mind-bending, expansive grooves. And perhaps more than ever, the track manages to convey the freewheeling, improvisation-driven and infectious energy of their live shows. 

  • “VERTIGO,” a synth-driven, deep house instrumental that sounds like a synthesis of the material off 2021’s Confusions, Larry Levan-era house and krautrock, anchored around the Swiss unerring knack for hooks and mind-bending groove.

“REPLICA M001,” Cloud Drifter‘s latest single features experimental rapper Pink Slifu audaciously spitting swaggering yet breezy bars over a lush, dreamy bit of film score-meets-jazz club jazz that opens with a swelling and swooning, cinematic strings before quickly morphing into a slow-burning, late night swing that effortlessly follows the ebbs and flows of his unique cadence. While recalling Digable Planets and Ishmael Butler‘s various other projects, “REPLICA M001” reveals a supremely talented band that can seemingly play anything — and at any time.

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: L’Eclair Teams Up With Phoebe Coco and A Ghost Column on Dance Floor Friendly “ODESSOS”

With recorded output that includes 2018’s full-length debut, Polymood, 2019’s Sauropoda, 2020’s Noshtta EP and 2021’s Confusions, the acclaimed Swiss-based group L’Eclair, founded and led by Bulgarian-born siblings Stef and Yavov Lilov established themselves as masters of a mind-bending, spacey grooves. Along with two live sessions for KEXP, which amassed over 900,000 views combined, the Swiss-based group have built up an international following, while landing on the playlists of adventurous listeners and DJs seeking deep grooves,.

L’Eclair’s fourth album Cloud Drifter is slated for a June 20, 2025 release through Innovative Leisure. Meticulously crafted over the last four years, Cloud Drifter makes a decided departure from the group’s signature instrumental music, with the album’s material featuring vocal contributions from a wide array of frequent collaborators they’ve worked with over the past few years, including Pink Slifu, Girl Named GOLDEN, Gelli Haha, A Ghost Column, and more. Having toured with The Cinematic Orchestra and W.I.T.CH. — including writing and recording W.I.T.C.H.’s 2023 effort Zango and The Cinematic Orchestra’s forthcoming album this year, and production work with Varnish La Piscine and Maston, the Lilov brothers have assembled a vast network of likeminded musicians. And across the entire album, they keenly curate a cohesive vision incorporating many disparate contributions.

Cloud Drifter‘s first single, “ODESSOS,” features Phoebe Coco‘s and A Ghost Column’s ethereal vocals paired with twinkling and oscillating synths and a dub-inspired motorik groove. Arguably one of the most club friendly songs the Swiss outfit has ever released, the new single is a bold, sonic left turn that retains their long-held penchant for crafting mind-bending grooves. And unlike their previously released material, “ODESSOS” manages to convey the freewheeling, improvisation-driven and infectious energy of their live shows.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: dadá Joãozhino Shares Breezy and Yearning “Pai E Mãe”

Niterói, Brazil-born, São Paulo-based artist João Rocha co-founded the ROSABEGE artistic collective with a few hometown pals back in 2017. He and his bandmates relocated to São Paulo in 2020. But with the world paralyzed by the pandemic, Rocha looked inward, retreating into his alter ego dadá Joãzinho — dadá being a homage to a special creature and zinho meaning little. This provocative persona allowed Rocha to “be open to possibilities, other ways of singing, other sources of courage.”

Relocating to South America’s biggest city at 23 and during a period of intense, forced isolation and toxic politics, Rocha lost interest in the bossa nova influences that ROSABEGE channelled. He felt that his new work needed to feel much more intense in contrast to the lighter, more playful sounds from his previous work. The “Brazilian Utopia” of 70s Música Popular Brasilia “didn’t make sense anymore.” The project needed to reflect the darkness of the moment, while liberally borrowing from dub, hip-hop, punk and samba — and perhaps inventing a few future styles in the process.

Rocha’s solo debut as dadá Joãzinho, tds bem Global is slated for a September 1, 2023 release through Innovative Leisure. Translated as “all too Global,” the album chronicles its creator’s relocation to São Paulo during one of the weirder and more uncertain moments of human history. Actively attempting to resist the darkness surrounding him, Rocha yearned to feel alive, and for music that stimulated his body to “move differently,” as he says.

“Desire for freedom was the north star of this record,” Rocha says. He goes on to explain that needed to “feel free about artistic decisions – that I didn’t have to play the instruments in a certain way to sound good, I didn’t have to sing in a certain way to sound good, and I didn’t have to write in a certain way to make sense and reach people’s feelings.”

Playing nearly all the album’s instrumentation — including electric and acoustic guitar, organ, drum programming, electronic production and “other things,” tds bem Global is a solo album that’s inspired by and features contributions from a number of music friends and associates, putting the spotlight on Rocha and his artistic community. “I wanted to get people together around the music.” He goes on to say that the album is also meant to encourage others to continue making their art. “This is just for inspiration as I hear my friends are inspired by it, inspired to take their own paths and take risks on their music or art. This is what I wanted.”

tds bem Global‘s third and final single “Pai e Mãe” is a breezy and melodic samba with mischievously quirky and experimental flourishes — including fluttering organ arpeggios. Rocha’s plaintive delivery floats over the undeniably infectious rhythms.

Directed by João Rocha and Rodrigo de Freitas, the accompanying video for “Pai e Mãe” is shot in a gorgeous, cinematic black and white and features the Brazilian artist dancing to the song’s rhythms and preparing a dinner/picnic for himself and his parents.

“For this samba, that carries so much of our music’s tradition, and still sounds fresh, I wanted to strip things down and communicate through the rawness of the body language,” the Brazilian artist explains. “Had my parents join the studio session, that was an emotional moment. I wrote this song about an episode we lived together, so it was a closing cycle to have them. This minimalist work in video expands the meanings of the album for me, that sometimes sounds so massive. Put things in a new perspective.”

Video by William Ruben Helms

Live Footage: The Black Angels’ Alex Maas Releases a Teaser of His Upcoming LEVITATION Session

Alex Maas is an Austin, TX-based singer/songwriter, best known for being the frontman and founding member of acclaimed Austin-based psych rock act The Black Angels and psych rock supergroup MIEN. In 2018, Maas’ life changed with the birth of his first child, a healthy and happy baby boy that he and his partner named Luca, which means bringer of life.

With his son’s birth, Maas experienced a complex flurry of emotions he hadn’t experienced or known before. Of course, he felt profound joy and awe over the creation of a new life — but there was to some lesser degree a deeply gnawing fear: What sort of world was his son going to grow up into and inhabit, exactly? How could Maas protect him its dangers and uncertainties? “The world is definitely messed up,” Maas says in press notes. “But there’s a lot of good in it too, and that’s why the whole world isn’t on fire—parts of it are. I do believe that there’s more good than evil.”

Deriving its name from the name of his first-born son, Maas’ Brett Orrison co-produced, full-length album Luca was released late last year through Innovative Leisure. Although, the album found Maas’ stepping out into the spotlight as a solo artist in his own right, the album’s material was a actually a long time coming, with some of its material dating back almost a decade — and painstakingly put together piece-by-piece over the past couple of years. While still rooted in the psych rock sound that helped win him fans and accolades across the global psych rock scene as a member of The Black Angels and MIEN, Luca’s material offers a much gentler, mediative take, showcasing what Maas says is “a whole different part of my brain.”

Inspired by the enormous skies and quiet, nature-filled expanses of his home state, the album finds Maas contemplating his son’s future in the terrifying and uncertain world, which he was born in and how he may attempt to navigate the perils, disappointments and frustrations of our world and our society. Unsurprisingly, it makes Luca the most personal and direct material, Maas has written and recorded in his nearly two decade recording career.

Last year, I wrote about two of Luca’s album singles:

“The City,” a woozy and intimate campfire-like song with a hauntingly sparse arrangement that reckons with the larger and brutal, historical cycle of human cruelty and violence. The song evokes despair, heartache and horror over the senselessness, stupidity and cruelty of our infighting and behavior towards each other,. “The enemy is always just outside the door and the enemy could be anything,” Maas explains.
“Been Struggling,” a dreamy and shuffling waltz that brings both classic Nashville and Scott Walker to mind, centered around a meditation on memory, fate and loss from the prospective of narrator who has seemingly lived a full and very messy life.

Much like countless other artists across the globe, the pandemic has put touring on hold indefinitely. So, Maas and his backing band — Bryan Richie, Jake Garcia and Rob Kidd — decamped to nearby Bastrop, TX to bring the live show that they had developed around the album’s material to the world through a live performance film, shot in the Texan city’s historic downtown. “We shot this down in an old opera house built in 1889 and a 100 year old German tailor mercantile building in historic downtown, which is now Astro Records,” Maas says in press notes. “This session is a glimpse of what a tour on Luca would look like had we not been in a pandemic. It was a joy to get out and get back with the friends and collaborators I created this album with, and bring these songs to life. For now this is the world tour, and a look at what we’re looking forward to being able to do on stage when we are back up and rolling! Thank you to Jonas Wilson of Mr. Pink Records who asked me originally to film this in the beautiful city of Bastrop.”

Featuring sections from Luca and three new songs, the live session shot in Bastrop, TX will stream as a Levitation Session on March 27, 2021 at 7:00PM Central. To celebrate the upcoming release of the live session and to build up some buzz for it, Levitation and Maas released a sneak peek of the session, “Too Much Hate,” a new song, played in a live setting. Centered around a spectral arrangement of reverb-drenched guitars, driving and tribal-like toms, shimmering keys and Maas’ intimate vocals, “Too Much Hate” is an incisive and thoughtful criticism of the ills of our world: from how we treat each other, how we raised our babies and our penchant for rash and impulsive decisions — without consideration of their long-term effect on ourselves and others. Indeed, there’s too much hate in our world and not enough listening and thinking.

“I tried to touch on a few things on this song that would attempt to identify things that make the world more beautiful,” Maas says of the new single. “I’ve been trying to give solutions and not just speak about the cancer that is eating our culture. Some problems of society are rooted in how we raise our children, how we treat each other and quick uninformed decisions when people shoot from the hip as opposed to sitting back and thinking rationally about how to act instead of reacting.”

You can purchase tickets to the livestream. But along with that you can grab an audio download of the session, plus limited edition cassettes and t-shirts with artwork by Real Fun Wow, available exclusively as part the stream. And you can also purchase a package that includes all of the above, with a limited edition vinyl pressing LP, signed by Maas and his backing band. Purchase link and information can be found here: https://levitation-austin.com/products/alex-maas-stream-ticket

Levitation Sessions Presents Alex Maas will be releasing through all digital retailers on April 9, 2021 and on vinyl early this summer.

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: Los Angeles’ Peel Release a Brooding and Atmospheric New Single

Los Angeles-based duo Peel is a new collaboration between multi-instrumentalist and visual artist Sean Cimino and multi-instrumentalist and producer Isom Innis. The project can trace its origins to a month-long recording session the duo held at Innis’ concrete loft above the The Orpheum Theatre. The loft’s cavernous space, which once held fleets of sewing machines thrumming and humming served as the perfect setting for musical experimentation through drums, amps and modular synthesizers.

Last month, I wrote about Peel’s debut single “Rom-Com,” which interestingly enough, was the first song that Innis and Cimino wrote together. Centered around shimmering synth arpeggios, a woozy guitar solo and a hypnotic, motorik groove, the track may remind some listeners of Gary Numan and Antics-era Interpol to mind while thematically focusing on the difficulty of finding one’s existential footing in the cyclical information spiral. Building upon the attention they’ve received for “Rom-Com” and “Catch and Release,” Innis’ and Cimino’s third and latest single “Citizen X” is an atmospheric and meditative track, featuring shimmering synth arpeggios, a slow-burning groove, stuttering beats, shoegazer-like guitar lines played through delay and reverb pedals paired with a soaring hook and plaintive vocals that reminds me of The Veldt and Cocteau Twins but with a subtle hip-hop nod. “Citizen X” may arguably be the most cinematic leaning track off the duo’s soon-to-be released self-titled, full-length debut, which is slated for an October 16, 2020 release through Innovative Leisure. And interestingly enough, the track appears on EA Sports’ FIFA 2K21 Soundtrack.

“’Citizen X’ was an outlier to our usual stream of conscious lyric writing process— the framework began more conceptually,” Peel’s Isom Innis explain in press notes. “It has a tongue in cheek tone and is coming from a disillusioned place. Originally, it was a slower shoe-gaze inspired track, but Sean had the idea to re-imagine it, speed it up and really emphasize the groove and treat the guitar more like Robin Guthrie [Cocteau Twins].”

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Los Angeles-based Duo Peel Releases a Brooding Visual for Hypontic “Rom-Com”

Los Angeles-based duo Peel is a new collaboration between multi-instrumentalist and visual artist Sean Cimino and multi-instrumentalist and producer Isom Innis. Interestingly, the project can trace its origins back to a month-long recording session the duo held at Innis’ concrete loft above The Orpheum Theatre. The cavernous space, which once held fleets of sewing machines thrumming and humming served as the perfect setting for musical experimentation through drums, amps and modular synthesizers.

Interestingly, the duo’s debut single “Rom-Com” was the first song the duo wrote together, and the track is centered around shimmering synth arpeggios, a woozy guitar solo and hypnotic, motorik groove that brings Gary Numan and Antics-era Interpol to mind. “We are obsessed with records like Second Edition (Public Image Ltd.) and The Pleasure Principle (Gary Numan); records where spirit and improvisation guide expression,” Peel’s Isom Innis explains in press notes. “The lyrics, deriving from a stream-of consciousness, are from the perspective of trying to find your existential footing in the cyclical information spiral.”

Directed by Taylor Giali, Robbie Jeffers and the members of Peel, the recently released video for “Rom-Com,” is a live recording shot in a stark, industrial-like black and white while capturing the duo through different arrays of photographs and hazy analog, security cam-like video — but with an interactive twist in which the viewer can scroll through a split screen of the band performing.

Peel’s self-titled effort is slated for an October 16, 2020 release though Innovative Leisure. Be on the lookout