Album Reviews

Mexican Summer

New York producer, DJ, composer and multi-instrumentalist Alexis Georgopoulos, aka Arp, has always been impossible to keep in a box. The highly creative artist’s forwardthinking and expansive sound has defied categorisation throughout a clutch of LPs for Smalltown Supersound, a cassette full-length on Geographic North, a collaborative album with Jefre Cantu-Ledesma and his own show on NTS. His cross-pollination of diverse stylings is on display once again on his magnificent fourth album and first for Brooklyn-based imprint, Mexican Summer.

Zebra is an amorphous melting pot of sonic abstractions and mutations. Obscuring the borders between contemporary and classic, electronic and acoustic, and experimentalism and mainstream, it drifts through otherworldly soundscapes and atmospheres with a natural and improvisational flow. Its 11 disparate instrumental tracks reference ambient music, spiritual jazz, minimalism, psych jams, avant-garde pop, kosmische and warbled funk using a heady concoction of analogue synths, double bass, Rhodes, electronic and acoustic drums, flute, vintage harmonizers and tape delay. Its complex rhythm structures, sometimes built out of the accumulation of light, floating layers, create an abstract sense of groove and funk which carries the album forward. Despite its experimental feel, the record is full of love, warmth, colour and a sense of blissful contentedness. Tom Jones ADD THESE TO YOUR PLAYLIST: Halflight Visions, Folding Water, Fiji| 9/10