Wes Gray, the Atlanta-based producer behind the Moon B moniker, has announced a new album, Lifeworld, his first release on 1080p. The tape, out next month, follows Gray’s recent releases on PPU (2013’s Moon B and past May’s II) and extends his electro-funk experiments, melding together esoteric samples with synth overlays harkening back to the analogue-beatmaking days Moon B’s music so adroitly evokes.
Lifeworld is Gray’s most ambitious work yet, aiming for a “remapped” take on his music, opening his register to danky jams, chopped samples of Tamil film clips, and boudoir-ready grooves. In order to achieve that, Gray plays with our aural frame of reference by dropping retro-sounding beats he’s just programmed in the middle of some steamy funk sampled straight out of a moldy record crate. Also, while the techno tangent present in Gray’s earliest work is downplayed for a g-funk mood, Lifeworld does not forgo contemporary signifiers, opening the album with a chopped and vaporous R&B piece, and peppering the tape with cloggy samples galore. The result is not exactly retrofuturistic, but an age-negligent funk. Gray has claimed “subcontinental movies” (which are quite notoriously sampled here) and Delroy Edward’s fantastic Slowed Down Funk series as sources of inspiration.
The resulting album not only lives up to Moon B’s reputation as an unrepentant gear-head, but has some of the funkiest grooves he’s ever played, and will be out on December 16 via 1080p, available on a 200-copies run of c30 Chrome Plus cassettes.
• Moon B: https://www.facebook.com/moonbatnation
• 1080p: http://1080pcollection.net