Groovemine,
Album Review
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While there has been a strong surge of music in the last few years that has merged classic electronic compositions with traditional world music, few have managed to accomplish this as well as Tarun Nayar on 22° of Beatitude. The album is a culmination of a decade of work collecting sounds from a multitude of different locations in Asia, arranging them together with electronic and dub performances to create a very organic medley of traditional and contemporary.
Nayar’s collage process on the album is what really makes the sounds stand out. It provides a much more raw, lo-fi, dub quality to the record rather than slapping a few Asian instruments over conservative electronic beats and calling it a day. 22° of Beatitude feels alive and breathing, and very personal. Nayar is careful enough to balance his synths and drum machines with enough natural performances as to make the songs feel much more human and dynamic.
This technique has been followed through before with success by artists such as Shigeto and Gold Panda, and Nayar stands with such musicians for their ability to bring electronic music into a more intimate environment for the listener. All three producers also have the gift of not making their source material sound overused and predictable like made for TV movie soundtracks. Nayar offers something genuine, and the result is powerful.
There are a few moments of cheese which bog the record down in sounding too genre specific and too cliché, but they are readily sidestepped by the strength of the rest of the album. It’s lack of adherence or definition within a particular electronic genre keeps things varied and develops an identity entirely its own. It makes for a solid and complete listen, and an intriguing offering to the world music connoisseur. 03/01/11
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