Ron Trent: What Do the Stars Say to You Album Review

If dwelling music was a human getting, it would be in its late thirties and plumb in the period of mid-lifestyle crisis, which makes a selected musical maturity an inescapable improvement. That it ought to be Chicago producer Ron Trent who delivers residence tunes its pipe and slippers on What Do the Stars Say to You is either remarkable or predictable, based on irrespective of whether you’re additional familiar with Trent as the firebrand who manufactured the spartan dance basic “Altered States” at the age of 14 or the co-founder of Prescription, a label renowned for its unfathomably unwrinkled deep home.

What Do the Stars Say to You is the polar opposite of “Altered States” and other early property data that jolted their way out of Chicago and Detroit in the late ’80s and early ’90s. It is florid in which so much early residence was uncooked laid again, exactly where its predecessors burst with electricity and smooth, in contrast to the genre’s usually spiky funk. The album revels in an extremely-languid hybrid of home, disco, jazz, and new age that nods to Stevie Speculate’s sweetly pastoral Journey By way of the Mystery Everyday living of Vegetation and the Germanic wooze of Tangerine Dream.

Trent is considerably from the 1st producer to bring live instrumentation to dwelling: Masters at Do the job’s Nuyorican Soul undertaking in the 1990s was a contact back again to the disco information from which home was born. But number of producers have absent pretty as considerably down the rabbit gap as Trent does in this article. The file attributes contributions from septuagenarian jazz violinist Jean-Luc Ponty, Ivan Conti and Alex Malheriros from Brazilian jazz fusionists Azymuth, and Texan psych outfit Khruangbin—an unlikely lineup for a house undertaking. A hint of jam-band earthiness floats in excess of the record like weed and patchouli at a Phish live performance. (The album is created, according to Trent, for “harmonizing with spirit, city lifestyle and character.”)

Synths and electronics do element all over the 10 tracks (15 on the mixed version) but they are meant as a framework for the are living musicianship, with Trent himself contributing drums, percussion, keys, piano, and guitar. In the course of, What Do the Stars Say to You keeps factors immaculately clean up and tidy It’s the type of report where by the mastering credit history (New York home and disco legend François Kevorkian) seriously deserves its prominence—an album to be downloaded in WAV and applied to check out new speakers.

Maturity, musicality, and finesse are not generally welcome phrases in dance songs, and What Do the Stars Say to You tends to make no concessions to anyone who likes their property tough, all set, and equipment-pushed. Anything is clean as velvet and as comfortable as a sloth sleepover, from Lars Bartkuhn’s silvery guitar solo on “Cool Water” to Italian ambient pioneer Gigi Masin’s synth lines on “Admira,” a song for all those who consider Manuel Göttsching’s horizontal masterpiece E2-E4 to be a minor also belligerent.