Various

New Neighborhoods

Genre: MODERN CLASSICAL / AMBIENT

Cassette

Boomkat Product Review:

From their lockdown ‘hood to yours, Bookworms, Félicia Atkinson, Space Afrika, CV & JAB, JD Emmanuel, Jefre-Cantu Ledesma, Roberto Carlos Lange, Sugai Ken, Ka Baird and many more offer room for reflection with a highly empathetic set indebted to Ernest Hood’s spellbinding 1970’s proto-ambient album ‘Neighbourhoods’.

The curatorial antenna of Freedom To Spend’s Pete Swanson & Jed Bindeman glow bright on this set, which takes Ernest Hood’s early mesh of drowsy, everyday field recordings and gauzy synths as the jump-off for a project spanning continents and which comes to highlight a mutuality between far-flung spirits that transcends time, space and place. Looking in every direction for contributors, the collected results most beautifully resonate with the everyday but dreamy qualities of Hood’s original work and make a damn fine set for the times in their own right.

It’s crammed with notable inclusions so we’ll get right into it. Fresh from issuing a standout mixtape Space Afrika yield a superb, Burial-esque collage of pads and fractal crackles woven with traces of the duo’s current homes in Europe, while new age synth pioneer JD Emmanuel gifts a rare archival excursion with the richly evocative scenes of ’Shenandoah, Texas’, and you can trust Dolphins Into The Future guy Lievens Martens to relay the uncanniness of his home in Belgium via ‘Five Elements, Five Repetitions’.

Félicia Atkinson can be counted on for theee most sanguine scenario of keys and hushed street noise in ‘The Willow’, and Bookworms supply an absolute killer with some of the strangest, most detuned AFXian keys and under-the-porch feels with ‘Fluctuations In Temperature’, while Todd Barton tends to the subtlest transitions between spaces in the David Toop-esque enigma of ‘Ashland Ambience’.

All proceeds from the first edition of this collection will benefit the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development, a coalition of community groups across New York City using research, advocacy, and grassroots to build equity and justice in their neighborhoods and citywide. ANHD’s mission supports lower income and working-class communities by developing affordable housing, an essential effort during the COVID-19 pandemic, where low-income, BIPOC communities have been hit the hardest. Member organizations of ANHD have provided 80,000 units to this date, and homes for almost 100,000 people.

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All proceeds from this release will be donated to the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development. Includes an instant download dropped to your account.

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