Sometimes the ingredients are the recipe. Why eat banana bread when you can just eat a banana? Why cook salmon, when you can have sashimi? Why make a brownie, when you can eat the chocolate chips straight from a bag? And yes, you may elect to make music from Simon James French’s new sample pack, but you could also just pop the 20 tracks into an audio player, sit back, and listen. You’d hear frazzled tones with a slight delay (“Broken Phone”), and soft pads with a textural heft (“Warm Piano”), and ominous, echoing, dank-corridor ambience (“Press”), and warped nostalgia reminiscent of Angelo Badalamenti (“Drunken Wander”), among many other drifty, dreamy sonic spaces. The set opens with “Glitchy Reverse Rhodes,” in which the electric piano plays the sound of a frozen moment. That track is reason enough alone to check out the new French collection, and then there are 19 more waiting.
Released at sjfmusic.bandcamp.com. It’s the third (“and final”) in a series.