Son Lux links with William Bell

New York trio Son Lux, comprised of members Ryan Lott, Rafiq Bhatia, and Ian Chang, have spent the last 3 years working on a long-format album to be released over the course of a year. The ambitious body of work titled Tomorrows spans 3 separate album releases, kicked of by the first instalment, Tomorrows I.

“We’re peeling things apart and putting them back together throughout this record,” explains Son Lux’s Ryan Lott. “Emotionally, relationally, and musically.”

The first volume in the series was recently released by City Slang on August 14th. Whereas prior Son Lux albums have been packed to the brim with ideas, the three-volume format of Tomorrows affords the music space to breathe and develop. Each release sees songs spun together with liminal instrumental spaces, resulting in a more natural flow while letting sound lead in conveying the complexity and tension of the story.

Lifted from the record comes a collaboration with the Grammy Award winning soul-singer and notable early Stax Records signee William Bell. The richly-textured, stunningly-alive single reflects on the blurring of time passing and evolving from small to increments to entire lifetimes, and throughout, an increasing feeling of losing, not gaining, identity.

Stunningly haunting, Son Lux build an eerie yet comforting sound of stretching melodic refrains and stuttered rhythms. Bell’s vocal delivery offers new life into this rework, a soaring and soulful take to contrast on a more retrained and muted original version.

On Tomorrows, Ryan Lott, Rafiq Bhatia, and Ian Chang train their sights on volatile principles: imbalance, disruption, collision, redefinition. But for all of its instability, Tomorrows’ exploration of breaking points and sustained frictional places is ultimately in service of something rewarding and necessary: the act of questioning, challenging, tearing down and actively rebuilding one’s own identity. It does away with the restrictions of the traditional album.

Son Lux’s sound is distinctly individual, a result of their reverence for artists who have carved an iconoclastic path forward. The band’s fluid approach to genre and structure draws on the groundwork of soul, hip-hop, and experimental improvisation, owing a debt to forebears as wide-ranging as Björk, Alice Coltrane, D’Angelo, Bob Dylan, and J Dilla. While their balancing of raw emotional intimacy and meticulous electronic constructions has earned comparisons to contemporaries like James Blake and Flying Lotus, Son Lux feels that it is the act of distilling their varied influences that has most strongly shaped their identity. On Tomorrows, they conjure vivid, unexpected worlds of sound, evoking textures as different as those of Timbaland and Terry Riley within the same composition.

Arriving at a time of considerable uncertainty in the world, Tomorrows is ambitious in scope and intent. Born of an active, intentional approach to shaping sound, the music reminds us of the necessity of questioning assumptions, and of sitting with the tension.

Listen to Only (Chasing You) [feat. William Bell] below

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