This dude ewonee: so proud of what he reps out here in NY. Not the speed-balling NY where everyone walks so fast they actually gallop (especially tourists). Nah, Radiance gives you that NY where you can relax, breathe deep, focus on one task at a time, correct your posture, and hang with friends drinking 40s and losing egos, positively. Or it’s the NY where you can fall in love, have the courage to become who you want to be, and get a bagel with coffee, all the while thinking about ecology and enlightenment.
You know, they call NYC the concrete jungle, and everyone focuses on the concrete part, but not the jungle part, the idea of a jungle, of shadows building another jungle inside the jungle, building another language inside the language; even the garbage heaps on the sidewalk sometimes speak. While this speaking encourages growth, sometimes silence amidst the whirlwind of urban rhythms, even briefly, enables us to better understand ourselves. Ewonee knows that, and through his music, tries to convey that, such that the album tries to shake the self out of ourself, as we walk out on the boulevard struggling to navigate the sidewalk traffic. And later on holding something in your hand, touching a shoulder of a co-worker you admire or choosing to do the right thing over the wrong. The long journey, not the short. Apples for breakfast, not bacon. Inside the mind of every beatmaker a Buddhist resides. These beats move slow because they replicate the speed of the mind at peace, and the speed of the soul when it interrupts the body for its own form of acknowledgement, which it sometimes gets. They represent the taming of time to form another time inside that time. That sound of a skateboard underneath the train and the train goes by but the skateboard’s wheels win in terms of loudness. AKA ewonee’s music resembles isolated glimpses of some larger, invisible context of a life, or of a fragment of a life searching for mindfulness and flow without sacrificing form.