Teebs
Collections, Vol. 1
Release Date: Dec 6, 2011
Genre(s): Electronic, Pop/Rock, Club/Dance
Record label: Brainfeeder
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Album Review: Collections, Vol. 1 by Teebs
Great, Based on 3 Critics
Based on rating 8/10
On YouTube, there's a BBC interview with Alejandro Jodorowsky, the cult director, mime, comic book artist, spiritual author, tarot card expert, and occasional actor. At around six minutes and forty one seconds, the interviewee (an Englishman whom we never see) asks Jodorowsky, “but as an artist you don't just make films, you write and. .
Based on rating 7.0/10
L.A.-based artist Mtendere Mandowa has always stood out from the Brainfeeder pack of weirdo hip-hop producers: his beats are shrouded in dewy mist and subtropical condensation rather than the crunchy boom-bap of producers like Flying Lotus or Samiyam. The way he uses filters and closely clipped loops has the effect of a pleasantly smudged watercolor painting (much like those he designs himself), vague hints of otherwise implacable sounds rotating and repeating in a whimsical way. It's eminently accessible music, full of tiny "eureka" moments of subtle bliss, deft touches, and minuscule finishes so that even a two-minute sketch could feel like a whole world waiting to be dissected.
Opinion: Very Good
The press release that accompanied Teebs' 2010 debut Ardour went something like this: A young Mtendere Mandowa originally fell into his canvas and musical art after breaking his leg during a skateboarding accident, days on days of apartment-bound boredom giving way to concrete replications of the wanderings of his mind - formed with first the paint brush and then the sampler. With the eventual release of Ardour – a record that began while the 24 year-old was in a similar situation of impasse, jobless and thus stuck at home, only to step away from it when his father died of a terminal illness – it was easy to make the leap of imagination and picture the compact, two minute intricacies that made up the eighteen tracks as separate meanderings of a hyperactive mind, small journeys that grew from unplanned starting points. It's perhaps no surprise then that, with such an apparent organic development to his sound, Teebs has chosen to drop Collections 01 at short notice, as though a snapshot into an ever revolving creative reel as opposed to a thought out considered and edited release.