Heavy Color - Soft Light (Curious Music)

What Your Ears Say & The Cover Looks Like

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What We Say

Whilst the music world is still warming its engine & readying to once again deluge us with far too much music to assimilate, check this this swirling, dizzying jazz inflected psychotronic fusion of krautpop, crack playing & new age beat science from '22 by Heavy Color on Curious Music. It's a trip

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What The Release Notes Say

Curious Music is pleased to announce the release of the brilliant new album, Soft Light by Heavy Color. Soft Light is a recombination of 60’s spiritual jazz, meditations in pattern-based music, instrumental hip hop, and psychedelic pop.

Soft Light is available as a digital download and limited-edition cd. A vinyl 180-gram audiophile release date will be announced later.

Scott Boberg, Deputy Director of the Ann Arbor Film Festival writes about Soft Light.

“Just a few days ago I read J.G. Ballard’s short story The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista, part of a sequence of his tales set in a futuristic seaside artist enclave called Vermillion Sands, a place where orchids have been bred to sing arias, metal sound sculptures grow like plants, stingrays fly in the air, and poetry is produced by computer program.  In The Thousand Dreams, homes are designed to physically reflect, in their malleable plastic walls, the mood of their owners and, being a work by Ballard, the story comes to a nihilistically-twisted conclusion.  What if, however, that psychotropic home was designed by Heavy Color and the experience of listening became a joyous one that, while it doesn’t shy away from the negative, is a buoyantly affirmative journey to the positive?

I realized that for me their new album Soft Light is actually a ten-room house, and as I stepped into each carefully-crafted space, I was immediately immersed in that specific sonic experience in which I kept finding personal reference points that continue to exponentially accumulate with repeated listening (hold your breath before diving into my very personal (and, yes, partial) list of where this music took me): Nik Bärtsch, Harold Budd, Kate Bush, Can, The Comet is Coming, Cluster, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Eno (Brian and Roger), Peter Gabriel, John Hassell, Hüsker Dü, Kraftwerk, Pierre Kwenders, My Bloody Valentine, Bill Nelson, Pink Floyd, Prefuse 73, Ravel, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Stereolab, Tangerine Dream, Wilco, Wire, and Hector Zazou… Yikes! 

Just like one of Ballard’s mood rooms, I suspect that each listener who steps into Soft Light will find their own network of reference points, a testament to the richness of experience that Heavy Color has invested in each and every room in this house.  Go ahead, make yourself at home and stay awhile.”

About Heavy Color

Heavy Color's surreal and cinematic compositions explore spiritual jazz, traditional music, electronic and avant-psychedelia, spawning the description Post-World Music. Their first album Arise Ye Spiritual Machine (2014) re-contextualized archival music in a modern beat-tape format. River Passage (2018), a collaboration with musicians in Eastern Congo that combines elements of Afrobeat, minimalist Electronica, and futurist Hip Hop, spans physical environments, cultures and languages.

In 2020 Heavy Color composed an original score for the film Invisible Hand, a documentary about the Rights of Nature Movement produced by Actor Mark Ruffalo. The resulting album, which blurred the line between minimalist chamber music and ambient electronic worlds was released by the experimental label, Curious Music. Most recently, they have completed a series of works in collaboration with Brussels based artist Haseeb Ahmed via installations in Richmond VA at 1708 Gallery and Cleveland Ohio at SPACES as part of FRONT.

In performance, they are often accompanied by a live ensemble which has featured such musicians as Mike Savina, Patrick Booth, Estar Cohen, Jeffrey Neimeier, and Lucas Madrazo.

Heavy Color is Ben Cohen and Sam Woldenberg.

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curiousmusic.us

Credits:
Mike Savina: Guitars
Patrick Booth: Horns
Estar Cohen: Vocals
Sarah Cohen: Vocals
Drew Parent: Marimba
Jeffrey Neimeier: Violin
Lucas Madrazo : Vocals

Heavy Color is Ben Cohen and Sam Woldenberg

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If you need another musical trip then take a journey through the eclectic, Slow Psyche wonderland