Ann Arbor's Trees drops this wicked ep, six slices of lush, each on their own planet but part of the same galaxy, where techno, hip-hop and house rub up against jazz, Kraut-rock and African percussion.
There's a saying in Ann Arbor that goes “I spent half my life waiting for Charles”. Charles Trees, because that's who people are referring to when uttering those words, is the local music scene's best kept secret. In a city literally brimming with talent (MC5, Iggy, George Clinton, Mitch Ryder, Recloose, Mayer Hawthorne, Shigeto, Dabrye, anyone?), Charles is one of the absolute heroes, a gem among gems, yet relatively few people outside the city limits have heard of him. Why? Well, probably because our man doesn't really care too much about fame, hipster blogs, online social networking or other forms of shameless self promotion. He just makes his music, and remixes, and spins his tunes around town, and sometimes even releases some of them, like his EPs on Moodgadget, Ghostly International, or Paris imprint Musique Large. Which is how we heard about Charles. He made us a brilliant remix for Pajaro Sunrise' “Old Goodbyes”, and after that we had the pleasure of meeting him in person. A deal was struck for an EP. It was the summer of 2012, and we were about to find out what the “half my life waiting for Charles” was all about.
Fast forward to 2014, and lo and behold, habemus EP. And not just any EP. A HUGE EP. Six slices of lush, each on their own planet but part of the same galaxy, where techno, hip-hop and house rub up against jazz, Kraut-rock and African percussion. Sounds like a cliché, right? Uh huh, yeah.
The title track starts out like a Sun Ra jam, with the brilliant Dan Bennett on sax. After the fist bass stab, the beat kicks in and we're taken on a jubilant ride towards the acidic finish. “Exodus” continues on a hypnotic house tip while the level of funk keeps rising. The slamming beat finishes things off quite nicely. On “Get Advanced”, Detroit rapper, poet and Egyptologist Intricate Dialect spits his rhymes over hypnotic and minimal percussion and some nasty 303-stabs. Dan Bennett returns on “What's Left”, a slow burning piece of space boogie. Madrid-based DJ F does a good job of remixing”Rootwork”, adding some eeriness by changing the beat and replacing Bennett's sax with trippy keyboards. And finally, the mighty Shigeto stretches “What's Left” to almost nine minutes, with a four-minute intro leading up to a more uptempo but equally hypnotic version of the original.
https://soundcloud.com/charlestrees
http://lovemonk.bandcamp.com/album/rootwork