Los Angeles’ Nicky Benedek and Alex Talan could not reside prior to now, however you possibly can wager they’ve summer time homes there. Benedek—who in 2011 cited Zapp and Roger Troutman as influences, making him probably the most clued-in faculty juniors within the historical past of upper schooling—obtained his begin making smooth, ’80s-inspired boogie that sounded prefer it had been swiped from the cassette deck of a classic lowrider (one other main affect: West Coast G-funk). When he graduated to a broader amalgam of R&B, new age, freestyle, and deep home, Benedek’s music remained steeped in analog heat and tape hiss. Talan, aka Coolwater, has proven related crate-digging instincts on his NTS present Cool World West, favoring artists like Joe Zawinul, Invoice Laswell, Haruomi Hosono, and in addition Talan’s late father, a filmmaker and bed room synth participant. Coolwater’s eponymous 2020 debut EP appears like a distillation of all these influences, a sort of L.A. jazz noir with a Blade Runner soul. Within the new trio Whole Blue, which incorporates their good friend Anthony Calonico, they dim the lights and ship an much more enchanting simulacrum of outernational jazz and big-budget new age.
The three musicians beforehand labored collectively on Coolwater’s EP, which on reflection appears to be like like a trial run for Whole Blue. Their debut album takes related sounds and influences—fretless bass, muted trumpet, racks of outboard results—and distills them right into a dreamier, extra ethereal fusion. “The Path” opens the report on an aquatic scene: A liquid electrical bass melody glistens like oily water beneath the docks; a delicate marimba rhythm clinks like rigging in opposition to sailboat masts. It’s chromatically lush, a feast of augmented chords and burnished accidentals; midway by means of, a keening wind-synthesizer melody carries the music to its logical smooth-jazz conclusion. “Corsair” picks up each the maritime metaphor and the retro sensibility: Every thing, from the flanged guitar to the LinnDrum thwacks, appears designed to evoke a selected period and spirit of digitally abetted jazz manufacturing. Again in its heyday, this was an costly sound to create; Whole Blue pay tribute to these studio payments of yore with luxurious chords and preparations that sound like 1,000,000 bucks.
In the event you didn’t know the backstory, it will be simple to imagine from the album’s glistening sheen that it was a reissue of an ’80s new-age relic. Even the evocative, globe-trotting titles sound like one thing from a Windham Hill or Personal Music laserdisc: “Coronary heart of the World,” “Chaparral,” “Jaguarundi.” It’s not simply the sound design that feels opulent; so do the songs themselves, which stretch out with an nearly extravagant sense of leisure, bass glissando and ersatz reeds mirroring one another in sluggish, sensuous motions. Irrespective of what number of occasions I’ve listened, each time the trio pivots to a very juicy chord, it looks like triple cherries developing on the slot machine.
