Bleep

Slauson Malone 1’s labyrinthine debut album A Quiet Farwell, 2016-2018 was a multimedia collision of word, image, and sound, and in the four years since, Jasper Marsalis has shown no desire to step out of the maze. After signing to Warp Records, Marsalis travels deeper (or perhaps “ever upward”) into his performance piece, creeping into the realm of song with his second album EXCELSIOR, yet remaining rooted in abstract, interwoven sonic collages.

EXCELSIOR is the kind of detail rich album that encourages pages upon pages of annotation and analysis. Marsalis’s craft is an ultra expressive one, his vocabulary of instruments and sounds forms a complex musical language: vocals are slowed to molasses, pitched up with helium, and then cut into pieces, where the abrupt stop and start of cut up digital clips contrasts against the shimmering reverb tails of guitars and strings. A maximalist philosophy permeates these songs, where waves of manipulated sound crest and dissipate, frictive pianos wander myriad jazz pathways, and ephemerally shifting beats ensure genre stays in constant flux.

Heavy solar rays melt the city tarmac of ‘New Joy’, an ode to submissive pleasure, forming the sticky ground upon which prismatic hip hop beats skate, while sweet guitars and piano emerge from the vortex of glitches. Picturesque, painterly arrangements of strings exhale on ‘Half-Life’, snapping into a tight groove then swelling at its most downtrodden moments. Such contrast speaks to Marsalis’s exploration of masculinity across the album: he snarls “Count the score, it’s a body war”, before lingering in intimate space with the words “Build a wall around me out of steel and concrete”.

The hypermediated, multidisciplinary approach of Slauson Malone 1 culminates on his second album: EXCELSIOR is the mark of an artist whose visions are fully realised.