SPACE TRAVELER: Swede:art’s futuristic soul offering, “Emotional Colors”, is an electronic journey into sound. It’s about blending the auditory into the other senses — so you can hear smells, see tastes, listen to colors, feel blue moods and bottle the night. The first track off the 16-song record, “Black Mining”, begins with what sounds like a high-pressure steam release, then a distorted voice transitioning into the incantations of a Speak & Spell. (Yes, that Speak & Spell. The children’s learning toy from the late 1970s and early 1980s.) The toy’s computerized voice turns menacing as it pronounces one intermittent word at a time, “Terror / Heaven / Danger / Earth / Circuit / Answer / Bullet / Machine / Zero”. It’s ominousness heightens with a thick, gummy staccato bass, and the altered game-noise of a Pac-Man eating ghosts.
“Emotional Colors” is packed with found sounds and synth acrobatics. You’ll hear spoken-word loops, horns, warped noises, record reverses, ringing and cinematic spoken lines. The ninth track, “Wonkybikez”, has an exotic Middle Eastern riff mixed with real burps, computerized blips, and a line spoken by actor Morgan Freeman in the movie “Seven” — where his character, Detective William R. Somerset, quotes Ernest Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls”: “The world is a fine place, worth fighting for.” “Snapshots On a Sunday Night” is a jazzy, Birth-of-the-Cool number with high-tone bleeps serving as xylophone. “A Room of Prayers” entices with a sultry, eloquent rap from Caits Meissner, over the top of flute, and scattershot percussion. Mosambique is an energetic, bouncing club romp.
The best moments on “Emotional Colors” are the songs going full-throttle into hip-hop or R&B based grooves that can strut like a true baller on the same playground as Erlend Oye, and Charles Webster. Sometimes Swede:art goes off into more experimental territory, like “Change” which seems a bit monotonous. But then an experimental piece like “Samklang”, a low-key antithesis to the groove tracks, wanders freely into pretty free form. Swede:art enlisted all sorts of friends (Blaktroniks, Stray, Duktus, Caits Meissner) to help him create this album of jazzy, atmospheric, neo-funk spaceouts. One of the best tracks, “Linguistics”, could fit on an album like Outkast’s “Speakerboxxx/The Love Below”. “Emotional Colors” is a record you throw on at midnight at a house party, or at a club, right when everyone’s feeling liquor lubricated and ready to hit a new gear. It’s a record that seems right up the alley of someone like BBC Radio One’s Gilles Peterson. The limited edition CD is due out June 26, 2010, via Tokyo Dawn Records — with digital downloads available then too. — Words by David D. Robbins Jr.
Swede:art “Linguistics” (Feat. Stray)
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