Some musicians want simply the best devices to create. Colin Andrew Sheffield shouldn’t be choosy that means. In case you occur at hand him the field of ignored CDs or LPs in your basement, he might most likely make an album out of its contents. Samples taken from commercially obtainable recordings are his uncooked materials. He grabs the nice bits and loops, stretches or in any other case processes them into parts of latest items of music that bear little or no resemblance to the supply materials.
Actually, distinction is strictly what he needed 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 that may flicker, churn or loom, however by no means swing. This time, the thought was to take materials that could possibly be used on a hip-hop album and provide you with one thing else. Sheffield has definitely succeeded on that depend. Beat-free and bereft of voices, the dozen tracks on Serenade really feel extra like reminiscences 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 possibly can inform that this music was made out of music, such because the scrap of a horn fanfare that surfaces throughout “Development” and the title observe’s mournful strings. However extra typically, the elements Sheffield makes use of are so small and so completely processed that each one that’s left are texture and feeling. That latter aspect is what makes Serenade alluring; each sound has emotion baked in. [Elevator Bath]
—Invoice Meyer
