Herb Sundays 153.5: Down2mpo. a companion mix.
More Down, More Tempo. Herb 153 Downtempo gets a sibling. + some new releases.
Herb Sundays 153.5: Down2mpo (chosen by Michael Cina)
art by .
Apple / Spotify / + Available albums on Bandcamp
We’re off season, but I can’t let you languish.
Due to popular demand, we’re going back to the lumbering breaks & beats of Herb 153 that still haunt Titanic.
After David Renard of the New York Times had his tail wagged by our post and Cina’s playlist from a few weeks back, we knew it was game on.
“Well, lace up my space-age sneakers, because this music is sounding good again. Confirmation that I wasn’t imagining things hit my inbox via a recent edition of the always perceptive Herb Sundays music newsletter, which found ample evidence that trip-hop is in the zeitgeist, like Logic1000’s new, low-B.P.M. mix for the long-running DJ-Kicks series. (They referred to the sound as “downtempo,” one of a few related labels, but let’s not get lost in the subgenre soup and just vibe, OK?)”
So I did what an editor does and mic’d up Cina, preparing the submarine. He had this to say before I closed the hatch:
“I made this playlist after we launched the first Downtempo… I felt like I had missed a few. In many ways, this feels more like a journey, an extension to what I had done before. I wouldn't doubt if I start a DOWNT3MPO mix today. “
Speaking of Y2K-addled minds, the new crushed single (the duo of Shaun Durkan and Bre Morell) has arrived (stream it here), and their debut album, no scope, has been announced.
“Starburn” deals in the last chance, no brakes theatrics that Herbs-Like-Us love and admire with lyrics "about searching for hope on the brink of despair,” Durkan says. “The song is a cry for some kind of divine intervention, or for a blessing of cosmic luck to make me feel like my life could eventually add up to something that made sense to me before the fear and regret catches up and takes the wheel." or as Jon Pareles says: “In ‘Starburn,’ Morell sings about exhaustion — “Time swings us against the ropes / with nowhere to fall back to” — and improbable persistence: “Does your star still burn on its own?” More, please.
Bre and Shaun stopped in for a set at The Lot Radio set this past week while in NYC.
Summer is firmly in play, thanks to Nick León’s album finally being here. A Joan Didion-referencing concept record of clipped, humid electronics and post-pop flourishes is all we could ask for. Ghostly fam
shows up to add his plaintive falsetto to the mix on the lovely “Ocean Apart” even.
If “Bikini” doesn’t thaw your chilly heart, you can leave these pages for good. If so, you can revisit his Herb Sundays from earlier this year.
This one is killer. I discovered it before this post when I clicked on the Herb Sundays profile on Saturday so I've had the whole weekend of listening to this one on repeat. I liked 153 but 153.5 is where it's at : )