Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Alexi Delano and Ambivalent - Brooklyn Weekdays


1. Lights Down
2. Last Track
3. Zoo Trip
4. Brooklyn Weekdays
5. Perfect Zed

Kevin McHugh, the producer & DJ commonly known as Ambivalent, follows up his 2010 EPs Rumors and Down with the release in April 2011 of Brooklyn Weekdays - five new tracks born out of a collaboration with Alexi Delano, the Swedish-born producer and resident of McHugh’s old New York stomping ground, who featured on Paco Osuna’s most recent Plus8 EP Amigos late last year and will be making his Minus debut with this release. The result of what started out as something resembling a game of musical Consequences beginning in summer 2009, Brooklyn Weekdays was conceived mostly in Delano’s New York studio as the two producers swapped loops and parts from works in progress that the duo had been working on individually. With McHugh making regular trips from his current Berlin base to his former hometown, it became a common for the pair to schedule a couple of days to work together in Delano’s Brooklyn studio in between weekend gigs - hence the EP title - bringing eachother pieces that could use a new perspective in order to develop into finished productions. With a shared enthusiasm for a broad range of electronic music, the process developed into a natural intuition for where to take the tracks: “The ideas I had that couldn’t get fixed would benefit from working on his system, and the things that Alexi’s system couldn’t fix I would take home and come back with some new ideas. Two months would go by before I came back to New York - we’d go back to the last track we’d made and soon be remixing our remixes of an old track that never went anywhere!” The resulting five tracks bear out the benefits of that collaborative process, with the EP traversing a range of styles from the warmer house sounds of Last Track and Perfect Zed to the more sinister techno grooves of Zoo Trip and Lights Down. Just as with a game of Consequences, the finished product takes unexpected creative turns that are likely to surprise as much as entertain...www.wordandsound.de