Remember how I mentioned springtime last week? Just kidding! It’s winter again here in Michigan, and I’m pretty broke, so I ended up staying home and listening to warm tunes most of the time. I discovered some real surprises by going out and simply looking for anything that felt new, an activity that I should do more often.
There’s nothing much more rewarding than setting out to surprise yourself and then doing exactly that.
I stumbled upon Hybrid Palms while tripping through Bandcamp, my favorite place for adventurous music. I scrolled until I came to this album, listed brightly and warmly: Pacific Image. To be brutally honest and superficial, the cover art beckoned first. I read the title and heard a few minutes of the opening track and that was it. I needed this. I needed to hear more and I needed to know what it was.
Apparently CFCF is bursting at the seams with new material. In addition to a new album, Radiance & Submission, he’s dropping a full-length cassette album on 1080p Collection called The Colours Of Life. Here’s a preview piece.
After getting excited about the upcoming traditional album (new single streaming right here), this is a complete surprise. You don’t exactly anticipate an artist returning after two years of near silence with a pair of full length records, but here they are!
This release will be 40 minutes of unbroken, blissed-out sound, full of bright timbres and worldly percussion. Timbre-wise, it’s more in line with his light, modern minimalist work, while the fluid sound collage structure nods toward his monumental Night Bus mixtapes. To a fan like me, this sounds like heaven.
The fact that he’s been nodding toward Ryuichi Sakamoto and Laraaji (a pair of gods, as far as I’m concerned) only heightens my excitement. The label page itself features a lengthy bit of backstory from the artist himself, mentioning The River EP, a new age-tinted instrumental journey into wide-eyed pan-global textures – and the record where I fell in love with CFCF’s music.
1080p Collection has been dropping some seriously intriguing music over the past year, and his inclusion on their roster only heightens the appeal. You can pick the album up on August 14th, on either cassette or digital download: The Colours Of Life order page on 1080p.
Optimistic Underground 