‘Everything and Nothing’ by RBSN | New Album, ‘Stranger Days’
Exclusive video premiere of ‘Everything and Nothing’ by RBSN, taken from the latest album, ‘Stranger Days,’ out via Ropeadope Records.
‘Stranger Days’ is the intimate, compelling and ambitious album that RBSN presents. The full length takes you on a climax – moving through psychedelia, soul, and jazz across the 10 tracks and taking inspiration from a plethora of other influences from electronic to Afrobeat, Dub and Folk sensibilities – ‘Stranger Days’ – meets the listener in joy and musical expansion to drive into the unknown.
“I think it is great that Ropeadope wants to work with this because it encapsulates a small community of beautiful players”.
Made in the center of Rome, Rbsn worked with producer and sound engineer Luca Gaudenzi at Pyramid Produzioni. The songs have a very broad spectrum of genres they draw from and yet the result is organic and homogeneous.
Takes elements of songwriting inspired by Jeff Buckley and Nick Hakim, and translates it with a contemporary jazz attitude that wants to give thanks to the great inspiration that spiritual jazz and soul were during the 60’s and 70’s .The lyrics encapsulate this variety of sound and research with a literary landscape taking inspiration from magical realism and authors such as Jorge Luis Borges and Cortazar and Theodor W. Adorno that allow the record to deal with topics like oppression and the causes of liberty in the first half of the record, and more introspective and naive in the second half.
The orchestral intro opening the title track ‘Stranger Days’ welcomes the listener to go in depth with the tough harmonies of ‘Colossus’ Lullaby,’ ‘Deep Mind Sea’ and come out on the other side with the dark ‘Interlude’ and ‘0 RH+’ featuring James Chatburn and uplifting ‘Speak For Yourself’ (Ft. Naima Adams).
‘Everything and Nothing’ is the title of a small collection of stories by Jorge Luis Borges, passed through many hands and that I’ve bought in San Francisco. “The soil and the trees,” “the stone and the blood” are elements inspired by the precious writing of the author. The song is the most “poppish” of the album as well as the last in the tracklist, it is inspired by artists like Jordan Rakei, Oscar Jerome and Olivia Dean. It tells the conflictual relationship between man and nature which in the video is represented by a thin veil of unrequited love, an intimate story directed in Super8 format by Brando Pacitto. A small analog and authorial glimpse that differs from the rest of the album.
Headline photo: Federico Zanghì
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