Soren Skov Orbit
Orbit Bound

EM Records: ...Roland P. Young is back for his fifth release on EM Records, back in the United States, back in San Francisco after sojourns in New York and Israel, back where he resided several decades ago. But despite all this talk of return, he continues to resolutely forge forward, combining his tradition-rooted horn mastery with an ever-expanding electronic palette, fusing wind with electricity, fusing American roots with an outward global vision. Recorded in his home studio, Young's expansive multi-instrumental mastery and studio skills have created a dense yet uplifting set of tunes, very melodic and groovy with a joyful sense of return and renewal. Roland is here, hear it on vinyl or CD.

K. Fruend.: ...Piano, handmade electronics, tenor sax, couple strings.I was after something tangible. Sounds you could roll around in your palm and consider different, complex, and flawed textures. Feel the weight, maybe even smell them.This desire is probably a reaction to the dissociative nausea from the constant simulacra of these early 2020s. Like deliberately going barefoot to feel yourself grounded in a real place, as I read Andrea Needham did when facing charges for disarming a warplane.Anyway, my methods to achieve these sound "objects" was to use a healthy amount of acoustic instrumentation with all its familiar sonic unevenness, to free sounds from rhythmic or thematic structure, and to give plenty of blank space around each note so the ear can reach in and pluck it out. A berry from a bush, an eyelash from a friend's cheek.Really though, a lot of the time now I just want to listen to the birds. There are plenty on here. Mourning dove, titmouse, helicopter.KF, Dec. 2021

LITA: ...Ethiopians’ deep-seated ethiocentrism, the legacy of a thousand years of history, has contributed in no small way to their music’s strong national identity, particularly impervious to any African influences. Latin influences, so pervasive in the great musical centers of West Africa and the Congo, have been similarly rebuffed, despite the brilliant attempts of a musician like Mulatu Astatke. He was the first and for a long time the only Ethiopian to have studied music abroad (England and USA). In the late ‘60s, he brought back ’ethio-jazz’, as well as a passion for Latin rhythms that was not readily shared by the Ethiopian audience. As early as 1966, he released a single and two LPs in the US entitled Afro-Latin Soul (and a third LP, Mulatu of Ethiopia in 1972), with his Ethiopian Quintet composed of American and Latin-American musicians (Worthy Records). That was three years before Fela’s first American tour and six years prior to Manu Dibango’s key breakthrough with the release of Soul Makossa in the Western ‘pre-World music’ market. All this goes to show how much the history of the African continent’s musical modernity should be reconsidered in light of the Ethiopian adventure, even though this lone spark bore little relation, musically or ideologically to the musical revolutions initiated most notably by Ghanian highlife, South African jazz, Congolese rumba or, much later on, by Fela.