Flamingo

Welcome back to the vivid, resonant sound-world of The 23s. With 2008's Bolivia (KK 043 CD/LP), the mysterious one-man-band delivered on an intention to make another kind of music - something that isn't entertainment, something that isn't show, something that goes, gently, straight to your soul. Now the producer from North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, has done it again with Flamingo. He delivers a special kind of cinematic journey that grooves in the opposite direction from his other, more rhythm-based, hypnotic dance productions. He does produce pattern-based music as The 23s, but it pursues a different intention; each listener should dive into a hallucinatory world of seen and unseen films projected by the inner eye. All ten tracks are romantic smooth-operators. They put themselves in service of an artistic vision in which the listener can get lost. The album can be seen as a love letter to the movie scores of 1970's French cinema or the impressionistic sound arrangements one hears in the early cinema of Peter Greenaway. With double-bass heat, discreet piano melodies, levitating guitar chords, some gentle horns here and there, and beats that recall the warm, jazz-influenced soul of old-school hip-hop, The 23s generate a sublime get-down-deep instrumental journey. You can listen to it attentively or play in the background, but it is recommended that you play Flamingo with a decent amount of volume, as all lounge tracks get bigger and brighter with sonic intensity, with an atmosphere that is alternately foggy and flooded with light. It's a 40-minute electronic journey that offers open-minded souls a chance to fill in the gaps between the notes with their very own milky fancy. The album is released in advance of a bunch of remixes by producers like Edward (Giegling, White), Christian S. of the Comeme tribe, Canadian producer The Mole, and German post-rock/electronic band To Rococo Rot.