Groovemine,
CD Review
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While it’s typically difficult to incorporate traditional sounds from across the globe into contemporary electronic music, it’s an even thornier problem trying to get them across to an audience without them sounding cliche, crowbarred, and all the while retaining some authenticity. Too often the music outside the Euro-American scene is used as an exotic embellishment. Janaka has, seemingly without any conscious of self, created an album of natural hybridity between electronica, dub, hip-hop and traditional Indian music.
“If anything, Pushing Air sounds like a dub-electronic record, with the traditional instruments being purely incidental, creating something akin to the aural set-dressing for Mumbai in the next century.”
What makes this such a strong combination is Janaka’s ability to wield all of them simultaneously in every song. Each genre comprises a part of his musical language, and there ’s no separating the elements as Pushing Air leads you through its narrative. Comparisons to musicians on the tier of Celestial, Mux Mool, The Spy From Cairo and Lamb would not be out of order, but Janaka somehow keeps his collection of material feeling cohesive, without that artificially layered quality much of the world/electronic camp seem to acquire.
If anything, Pushing Air sounds like a dub-electronic record, with the traditional instruments being purely incidental, creating something akin to the aural set-dressing for Mumbai in the next century. This makes the album much more musical and less novel. Refreshingly, Janaka avoids the dance floor altogether to create a moody and downtempo expression.
The middle of the record lags a bit as Janaka tries is hand at straight dub and ends up eliminating some of his strongest tools, and the production feels glossed to the point of sterility, but Pushing Air always manages to recover through its creator’s obvious maturity in composition. Every instrument is allowed its space to breathe, and nothing feels overdone or cluttered. There are a lot of wise choices on this record, and it shows. 07/20/10
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