News of a new album from tone-painting beat-poet, Teebs, due soon on Flying Lotus’s Brainfeeder. It was back in the mists of 2010 that LA-based Mtendere Mandowa dropped debut, Ardour, to some acclaim (e.g. ‘one of the most beautiful albums of the year, alternating between trembling lullabies and softly thumping hip-hop daydreams.’ RA’s Andrew Ryce), and Collections 01 a year later—more a set of sketches than an album proper. E S T A R A, after the Spanish ‘estar’ = ‘be’/‘stay,’ may connote where someone is at, literally or metaphorically, but is evidently more loosely denotative of the site of the recording’s creation—in the same bedroom studio as his last. And while Ardour came amid personal turmoil and his father’s death, E S T A R A is a sign of his making art entirely on his own terms. Whatever you make of it, it sees the beat-painting tone-poet further mining a rich vein of kaleidoscopic hip-hop infused with elements from shoegaze to Exotica, with Jonti, Populous, Jaga Jazzist‘s Lars Horntveth, and recent collaborator in Sons of the Morning, Prefuse 73, chipping in. Single, “View Point,” is a signature vignette of sun-struck headnod with a coda at once blissed-out, elegiac, nostalgic.
E S T A R A is due out in April on Brainfeeder.
