Photo: Asher McShane
Over the years Auckland producer Christoph El Truento has output hip-hop, ambient, footwork, dub, and more, and managed to make every release feel less like ticking genres of a checklist, than something deeply felt.
The last time we heard from him was as producer on Avantdale Bowling Club’s second album Trees, a release which pulled back on the jazz element of that group’s musical makeup.
His new release Circle of Friends feels like it’s here to redress that balance, as he plunges headfirst into brushed drums, complex keys, and free-roaming horns. As the title suggests, it’s done with the help of some close collaborators.
That’s Te Whanganui-a-Tara singer Mā closing out the track ‘Where Did We Go Wrong’, following around six minutes of jazz vamping. The album has several moments like that, where wild exploration suddenly tightens, giving way to structured vocals.
The songs are rounded out by some of Aotearoa’s finest players: to name a few, there’s Julien Dyne on drums, JY Lee on horns, Cory Champion on vibes, and Jeremy Toy & Mara TK playing guitar.
There are also guest vocalists throughout, including Avantdale’s Tom Scott, who turns beat poet on ‘Burning Sensation’, riffing on gentrification in a densely metaphorical and funny way.
The purely instrumental cuts like ‘DDD’ still pack plenty of Truento’s personal flavour, smuggling in bubbling dub-style bleeps, and some of the summery vibe of Live From the Cloudy Subtropical, while Dyne roams around his cymbals, and Champion goes off on vibraphone.
The unmistakable voice and guitar playing of Troy Kingi shows up on ‘Numb’, starting off as a concise reggaefied track, before more reverb creeps in, and more instrumentation, and things head in a psychedelic direction.
Adding to the stacked roster, Ladi6 appears on Circle of Friends’ closing track, ‘Drip’. It’s actually a great aural example of Christoph El Truento’s skill set and nous behind a mixing desk: for almost half its length bass and piano explore the track’s scale in classic jazz fashion, before they settle on a chord progression that’s then handed off to the track’s RnB-focused second half, like passing the baton in a relay race.
Encompassing different decades of musical style within a single song, never mind one so slick, might feel like a flex coming from any other producer. But Truento keeps proving that this stuff is second nature to him, as he wanders through genres, and makes them his own.
