Mas Aya: Coming and Going Album Assessment

A easy tenet guides Brandon Miguel Valdivia’s music as Mas Aya: “The extra private you can also make music, the extra fascinating it’s.” He does simply that on his fifth album, Coming and Going. On “Be,” the Nicaraguan Canadian percussionist and producer passes the mic to his younger daughter, Martina, and Valdivia’s associate and co-parent, Lido Pimienta, seems all through the album—as she did on 2021’s Máscaras—softening Mas Aya’s twitchy, organically textured beatscapes to the purpose that they really feel just like the fruit of a household jam session.

Spending a day with Valdivia and Pimienta sounds prefer it have to be enchanting, contemplating the duo’s huge vary of experiences, credit, and collaborations—from remixing Run the Jewels to starring on a youngsters’s tv present with Beverly Glenn-Copeland. Preserving busy all through pandemic purgatory, Valdivia and Pimienta not solely grew to become mother and father, however moved from cosmopolitan Toronto to the comparatively suburban London, Ontario. Coming and Going was initially composed round subject recordings that Valdivia collected at his mother and father’ home, drawing upon Buddhist religious practices to create a way of tranquility inside the frantic beats, like Arthur Russell after listening to Traxman.

Coming and Going boasts a affected person, panoramic sound that embraces a lifetime of disparate cultures, communities, and influences. Valdivia welcomes home music’s pulse below religious jazz’s sprawling tent; the album gathers collectively a village of visitor gamers, reminiscent of Afro-Cuban percussionist Reimundo Sosa, trumpeter Nicole Rampersaud, and Josh Cole on bowed bass. “Dora” and “Windless, Waveless,” the album’s bouncy opening songs, flash again to folktronica-era 4 Tet and Caribou. “Ocarina” is something however a reference to The Legend of Zelda, wrapping Rob Clutton’s luminous electrical bass in rustling percussion and Rampersaud’s brilliant streaks of horn. Pumping pianos harking back to Mas Aya’s labelmate Scott {Hardware} echo all through “What Shattering!” and the astonishing “No Hint,” an oasis of jazzy ambient bliss with vocals from fellow Toronto musician Isla Craig.

By the point he reaches nearer “Abre Camino,” Valdivia has stretched all the way in which out, filling practically seven minutes with shimmering synths, picket flutes, and rhythms piled upon rhythms. Miraculously, these sorts of densely crisscrossed threads soothe as an alternative of stress, drifting deeper into the ambient dimensions of Mas Aya’s music. On Máscaras, his music’s religious dimension masked political subtexts that have been revealed in samples of avenue protests and revolutionary poets. This time, the private is political. Alongside the warmly tactile sounds of the album’s innumerable interwoven devices, the loving presence of the 2 main individuals in Valdivia’s life, and a good bigger chosen household of shut collaborators, creates a human connection so sturdy you possibly can really feel it. A technique of pushing again in opposition to injustice, he suggests, is just current within the right here and now along with your family members—an motion so potent it wants no phrases to resonate.

Mas Aya: Coming and Going