Some musicians want simply the correct devices to create. Colin Andrew Sheffield shouldn’t be choosy that approach. In case you occur at hand him the field of ignored CDs or LPs in your basement, he may most likely make an album out of its contents. Samples taken from commercially accessible recordings are his uncooked materials. He grabs the nice bits and loops, stretches or in any other case processes them into parts of recent items of music that bear little or no resemblance to the supply materials.
The truth is, distinction is strictly what he wished to perform when he got down to make Serenade. It follows up Pictures, a 2023 launch that used samples from jazz information to create a sequence of soundscapes which may flicker, churn or loom, however by no means swing. This time, the thought was to take materials that might be used on a hip-hop album and provide you with one thing else. Sheffield has definitely succeeded on that rely. Beat-free and bereft of voices, the dozen tracks on Serenade really feel extra like recollections of an artwork film that moved you 30 years in the past than amalgams of passages from funk, soul and library information.
There are events the place you may inform that this music was made out of music, such because the scrap of a horn fanfare that surfaces throughout “Development” and the title monitor’s mournful strings. However extra usually, the components Sheffield makes use of are so small and so completely processed that every one that’s left are texture and feeling. That latter component is what makes Serenade alluring; each sound has emotion baked in. [Elevator Bath]
—Invoice Meyer
