I’ve not been listening to albums specifically from this year. I even forgot that Pino Palladino/Blake Mills’s Notes With Attachments came out in 2021. It’s a great album in terms of compositional form. Musically it’s very different, but it reminds me of the place I was in when I started to put together Sons Of Kemet’s Black To The Future. I love its warm, organic atmosphere. Madlib’s Sound Ancestors contains one of my favourite tunes of recent memory – Road Of The Lonely Ones.I’ve listened to that more times than I’d like to admit. The album is such a deep work, I can tell it’ll keep growing on me.
I’ve been learning the shakuhachi flute, so I’ve been listening a lot to Watazumi Doso Roshi too. He’s a Japanese master shakuhachi player. He doesn’t specifically consider himself a musician, but uses music as a meditation and spiritual exercise in order to connect with nature, in the zen tradition. Before I started listening to Hotchiku [1968] I had this idea it would be this sort of passive, new age-y background music. It’s not at all. It’s pretty turbulent, unpredictable and full of dynamism. You can really feel the emotion, really sense the natural world.