blueblue

Listeners familiar with Sam Gendel will recognise the fuzzy mood and playfully warped sound of blueblue immediately. The difference is that where the LA-based multi-instrumentalist’s albums have previously tended to capture the digressive quality of a great sketchbook (a feeling compounded by Gendel’s general prolificness), the music here is more unified. It collapses fusion (“Yoko-Jima [横縞, Horizontal Stripes]”), exotica (“Shippō [七宝, Seven Treasures of the Buddha]”) and noir-ish soundtrack music (“Uroko [鱗, Fish Scales]”) into a kind of extended twilight in sound. Call him jazz, indie, experimental, whatever—his real medium is mood.