Emancipator and their collaborative track, “Mamba” with Lapa and Marley Carroll from new album ’11th Orbit’ is our featured track for New Music Friday today. This west coast producer with DMV ties continues to shine. We also share MoonTree for the first time alongside Dflexxx, Lindsey Sampson, Psychedelic Revolution, and Tommy Alexander. I hope you enjoy the variety as much as I do and I hope these tracks contribute to an excellent weekend for you and yours. Stay safe, warm, dry out there!
You can find all these tracks along with more excellent music on the Alchemical Records Multigenre Mixture playlist on Spotify.
It’s fairly unusual for us to feature a mostly instrumental track, but we’ve been keeping an eye and an ear out for Emancipator for some time. These most recent collaborations with Lapa will result in their album, 11th Orbit (available now), of which “Mamba” is the final single. “The origins of this track,” says Carrol, “go all the way back to August 2016 when I stayed with Doug [Emancipator] for a few nights at his house in Portland. He played me a demo beat of something he had been working on, and he had a turntable setup in his studio, so I flipped through some samples to find something that could fit. Those scratches in the intro are some of the first ideas we came up with.” Emancipator has been making a name for himself in Portland, OR, but we’d like to think that some of the influences gained while spending time in the DC area have contributed to the sounds catching the attention of outlets like Billboard, Indie Shuffle, College Music, BBC Radio 1, KCRW, FIP, and SiriusXM.
Tommy Alexander’s “Backslide” has an air of classic rock with a modern indie folk feel that combined with an excellent narrative exudes a timeless quality. “I wrote backsliding on the piano,” says Alexander. “The little chorus came right out of me and hung around for months. I would freestyle around it and never really made a true pass at trying to finish the song until the day before we went into record it. When you’re in the dark you feel like you’re always there. It’s strange how blinding the dark can be.” Alexander’s adventures begin in Portland before relocating to Nashville where he met producer Andrija Tokic, who Alexander calls “a wizard of audio.”
Psychedelic Revolution is a one-man project whose latest single provides his own modern classic with “At a Loss for Words”, a haunting composition that has a beautiful sense of space. The dynamics come in all shapes and forms from the variety of instrumentation to the gentle pauses that help listeners navigate the emotive terrain that may leave you “cold and gasping up for air.”
Lindsey Samspon navigates in the darkness in her latest single, “Night Driving”, which acts as a metaphor for hitting life’s open road with the one you love, perhaps without having a clear roadmap. “Night Driving” is a song that hints that the destination is secondary to being with the one we love. Though, the song’s evolution over time is also a reflection of the personal changes in Sampson’s life as she acclimates to her recent move from Boston to Nashville while pursuing a Master of Divinity from Vanderbilt Divinity School. ‘What once was an ode to persevering through a complicated romance has since evolved into a waltz with the divine whisper for reassurance through life’s most uncertain moments.’
Drop the bass. Drop the beat. If you’re looking for a heavy-hitting dance track for the weekend, queue up the Battery remix of “Mus B” by Dflexxx, aka Darnell Ramone Williams. The song is thumpy, punchy, and offers loads of swagger while amalgamating hip-hop, trap, and club music together. If you’re a fan of Drake, Chris Brown, or Tyga, you’ll love this and other Dflexxx singles like “Today” and “Do It”.
18-year-old writers and multi instrumentalists/artists Ben Cuomo and Jaya Franceschini of New York deliver the avant-garde, ambient-soul, neo-jazz-inspired track that is “Lullaby For Our Last Night”. Grounded in a spacious piano sound and thoughtfully delivered vocals, the song provides bursts of ambiance and small doses of experimentalism. We are excited to see what the future holds for this emotive duo. The band credits artists like keiyaA, Liv.e, Nick Hakim, and Tyler, The Creator for having inspired and paved the way for MoonTree’s forthcoming first EP.
Daniel Warren Hill is an American musician, writer, and motivational speaker. He is best known as the frontman for Washington DC area Alternative Rock band YellowTieGuy, as co-founder of Capitol Groove Collective, and increasing the exposure of artists on a global scale through his work with Alchemical Records.
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Alchemical Records is a Washington, D.C. based music publication. We cover the Washington, D.C., Baltimore and Richmond, VA metro area music scenes, including band interviews, articles about your favorite musicians, new music and concert dates.
