Happy Child - Carmen Jaci (2023)

Ideated from: going through some releases from the last few weeks I’ve been spinning a lot.

I read about this on a closer listen just before it released and I’d been waiting anxiously for it to drop. Now that it’s out, it’s hard to put anything else on lately.

A wildly adventurous record, mixing a bizarre and whimsical set of sounds and wrangling them into surprising, delightful soundscapes.

For a start, you could picture a rap or R&B record, but with each sound (instrument, trap beat, vocal) replaced with a sample of something entirely different. Vocal snippets become a piano figure, bloopy synths become a guitar riff, blips of noise become a cymbal hit, a harp sample becomes a horn chart.

It’s all very familiar and conventional in some ways, but incredibly challenging different in others.

Tracks I Liked

I See - as surreal as everything else here, with maybe slightly more humor

Jeux D’eau - playful jazz torch song with the various synth layers freaking out beneath

Danse Lunaire - tiny vocal samples fill out the percussion figures to make it feel like a vocal tune, even though no one is saying anything