American Landscapes

Emancipator, who’s been featured from time to time on this blog over the last few years, has a new album dropping this Tuesday called Safe In The Steep Cliffs.

It’s a hazy panorama of bucolic dreamscapes traversed with lazy-day tempos. The most impressive part is the obvious care and attention paid to the percussion throughout every song. Emancipator offers a vast selection of richly layered drums. Not only are they dynamic and full of depth, but they’re substantive in composition with interesting meters, numerous polyrhythms and more. As for the melodic elements, he presents a looped style of live instrumentation, but rarely allows them to linger long enough to outstay their welcome.

Overall, the album is comprised of a folksy, organic sound palette, sparking visions of rolling plains and pine tree canopies. You might refer to it as heartland trip hop.

The effort is a well defined improvement over his first release, Soon It Will Be Cold Enough. That album shared many elements with Cliffs, such as its pace, foundation of instruments, and atmosphere. But it was hard to distinguish one song from another. Steep Cliffs solves this by adding a significant stock of new sounds and instruments to differentiate each track. Occasionally that means it slips into the loungey wing of downtempo and even touches on the fringes of smooth jazz. But on the whole, it serves to utilize more colors from the spectrum.

The beauty of much of this album comes in the details. With each listen, something new is there to be found within it’s subtle depths. But that may be missed by a lot of listeners, given its relaxed pace. It doesn’t demand the listener’s attention, allowing them to tune in whenever they feel like it. The tracks also sometimes break off into spacey ambiance where thoughts roam wild, breaking concentration on the details.

But those breakdowns are exemplary of why some of the tracks are so good. They are the valleys of a diverse landscape that also features rolling plains and steep cliffs.

You might have heard tracks off the album on some of our previous mixes. Title track “Safe In The Steep Cliffs” was on the Downbeat Treaty and “Ares” on Dourbeat (both of these tracks remain the CS picks of Steep Cliffs). He recently posted “Cliffs” for free download, so grab that below. Painting by Frederick Edwin Church.