It was the spaciousness that made Understand Its Magnificence, Acknowledge Its Grace, Shabaka Hutchings’ pensive ambient jazz full-length, so outstanding. In all of Shabaka’s earlier initiatives—Sons of Kemet, the Comet Is Coming, and Shabaka and the Ancestors—gamers piled up on prime of each other, craggy stones stacked right into a towering wall of sound. For Understand Its Magnificence, Shabaka put aside his hard-edged tenor sax, changing it with the delicate watercolor palette of flute and clarinet. Even on the album’s busier compositions, just like the sprawling “I’ll Do No matter You Need,” or the polyrhythmic groover “Physique to Inhabit,” you can hear the space between every instrument: Shabaka his collaborators reaching transcendence via a unique form of expansiveness.
There’s rather a lot much less area on Possession, Shabaka’s follow-up to Understand Its Magnificence, however these dusky songs unfold with equal grace, like a night primrose blooming. Shabaka’s woodwinds are consistently molting, the tail ends of echoes settling into the fecund humus. Textures replenish the stereo discipline: Droning chords radiate quietly within the background just like the hum of {an electrical} equipment. Filtered percussion chugs like far-off equipment. The fragile great thing about its predecessor stays, however Possession is a little more shadowy. A skinny present of tension winds via every of its 5 songs.
Opener “Timepieces” illustrates this level most explicitly, starting with a piano that loops over itself like a buffering .gif and distant, doleful moans dipped in reverb. Because the drum sample quivers to life, rapper billy woods describes the contours of a particular form of grownup heartbreak, one the place the previously entwined can’t ever let go fully. Shabaka’s clarinet shimmies via woods’ syllables, his flute repeats a round determine, and wordless, choral harmonies add a depth that goes nearly unnoticed at first. Although each tone has a rounded edge, woods’ gruff cadence and heartrending lyrics provide a counterbalance; the track exudes the sting of a bittersweet reminiscence.
That competing tranquility and pressure colours most of Possession. On “To the Moon,” samples of crickets create the noise ground, over which a digital keyboard’s arrhythmic triggers type a glassy, undulating pad. As Shabaka and André 3000 whirl round one another, every thing melts: Their flutes overlap with a vibraphone, which overlaps with a chiming guitar. A grasp drum emerges from the haze, progressively overtaken by a sine wave bassline. Throughout “Reaching Again In the direction of Eternity,” Shabaka’s plaintive clarinet glides over Nduduzo Makhathini’s spare piano whereas Surya Botofasina’s synths and Carlos Niño’s wispy percussion deepen the somber temper. There’s an beautiful ache to this music, the juxtaposition of vivid autumn foliage towards a gray, overcast sky.
“Timepieces” is the sharpest departure, however all 5 tracks on Possession take Shabaka’s mix of New Age, jazz, and hip-hop additional afield, every in a barely completely different course. The songs really feel too distinct from each other to be a group of leftovers or B-sides—although “I’ve Been Listening,” which options Elucid, Brandee Youthful, and Esperanza Spalding, the identical crew that produced Understand Its Magnificence standout “Physique to Inhabit,” occupies a brighter, extra mystical area that doesn’t fairly sync with the EP’s uneasy vibe. Possession demonstrates Shabaka’s eagerness to tinker with the system, to discover how his earlier maximalism may very well be utilized to the sparser, extra inside music he’s been making since returning to the flute. Not all the noise that surrounds us is deafening, however it’s fixed, and maybe the one technique to remodel is to fold into the enveloping din.