Given that Bristol, UK, the place from where trip-hop headed out into the world in the 90s, is less than an hour up the road from me, it is particularly comforting to hear its influence still being felt in modern music.
Throughout Tides, the debut album from Ævn, you can clearly hear its subtle influence, but there are also numerous other sonic forces shaping it. But anyone making music in the modern age who isn’t mixing and matching sounds and blending styles into new shapes and sonic experiences really isn’t moving with the times. Genres are obsolete, demarcations smashed, existing musical barricades and traditions there to be stormed. Tides is perfectly named for an album built on such an ebb and flow of the then and the now.
The title track kicks things off, and it isn’t hard to hear the echo of the same slow, hazy grooves so loved by the likes of Portishead, helping to guide the song along. There are evolving instrumentals, such as “The City This Morning,” which rise out of ambient understatement to deliver shimmering, shuffling charm. There are tracks, like “You Take The Night Away,” which run more on liquid, clubland R&B vibes, focused less on where we have been and more on where things go next. And then, thanks to “The Lake,” there are vibrant, infectious dancefloor groovers.
But as much as the songs here are built from clever instrumentation and a deft weaving of the already familiar with the totally fresh, it is Ævn’s ability to understand that scenes like trip-hop, like punk or rock and roll before them, were just moments in a long evolving story.
Sure, reference the past, but don’t get stuck in it. Acknowledge what has gone before, but don’t plagiarize it. Use the music of earlier times merely as building blocks, rearrange it, change it, challenge it, and put it all back together using the most modern of creative cement to build the most original, forward-thinking, and stunning sonic architecture imaginable.
And that is precisely what we find Ævn doing on this stunning debut.
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