J-E-T-S - ZOOSPA

J-E-T-S - ZOOSPA (Innovative Leisure) Release date: Friday, May 24th 2019 Airplay Date: Friday, May 24th 2019 Bertus Distributie: www.bertus.com J-E-T-S is Jimmy Edgar and Travis Stewart (Machinedrum), two of the past decade’s most versatile and protean producers, who have artfully glided through techno, house, IDM, bass, hip-hop, R&B, and pop without being pinned down to any one of them. Their only commitment has been to lucidly fuse the mutant strains of the past into the vaguely familiar present. No ideas are original, but they’re singularly creative artists who could only comfortably exist in modern chaos, the strange invented future.

 

 Released on Innovative Leisure, Zoospa is fiercely cohesive but wildly varied. It’s a group effort casting a wide net of brilliant collaborators (DAWN, Mykki Blanco, KingJet, Rochelle Jordan, Tkay Maidza), but ultimately guided by the auteur visions of Edgar and Machinedrum. If many all-time great duos are guided by a competitive rivalry, J-E-T-S discard that sensibility to form a unified whole. If not in sound, they channel the two-heads-one-brain spirit of a more danceable Autechre or Outkast raised on the Belleville Three and first wave IDM. If you heard Timbaland and The Neptunes in 1999, this is what you’d expect pop music to sound like 20 years later.

 

The genesis of J-E-T-S fittingly dates back nearly two full decades. Machinedrum and Edgar first meet as teenagers on a pivotal trip to Miami, one of their first-ever gigs outside of the places they were raised (Edgar originally hails from Detroit, Machinedrum from rural North Carolina). They immediately bonded over a mutual love of Warp, Schematic Records, and Chocolate Industries. A tight friendship was forged when both lived in New York, but their first self-titled EP wouldn’t drop until 2012, by the time the pair had independently decamped to Berlin.

 

Eventually, they relocated to Los Angeles where their second EP was recorded in 2015. The idea was always to record something bigger and more expansive, but it wouldn’t become a reality until Edgar headed up the coast, eventually settling and building a home studio in Portland. That’s where Machinedrum headed in the late summer of 2017 to cook up the tracks that eventually became Zoospa.

 

Tracklist

1. Fauna Sauna 01:32
2. Potions 03:02
3. Fire Fly 04:21
4. Look Out 03:31
5. Lotus Hd 02:14
6. Play 02:38
7. Real Truth 03:04
8. Ocean Ppl 04:03
9. Hyper Hibernate 02:20
10. Q Natural 03:23
11. Team Effort 03:03
12. Water And Stone 03:08