To Illustrate cover

To Illustrate

Released

This is just a compilation, I suppose, on the Wisdom Teeth label, of people working in a beat-centered mode, but it overflows with so much good energy and has such a vast creative wingspan that it feels like a major statement (even if that idea is sort of dumb in this context). Maybe it’s a great snapshot of something genuinely beautiful, like an iPhone shot of cherry blossoms? Like other great compilations, it feels as if these acts all worked together to make this album and, for all I know, they did. Everything, by request of label heads K-Lone and Fact, sits around the 100 BPM range, which is one point of unity. The larger commonality is the maintenance of a sunny disposition even as the beats crater or open into sandy abstraction. Ideas spring up like rushes here.

Sasha Frere-Jones

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