Final week, André Benjamin, finest often known as André 3000, one-half of the hip-hop duo OutKast, lastly launched his début solo album. Over the previous decade, Benjamin, who’s forty-eight, has chosen a life away from the highlight, however has stayed shut sufficient to it to sometimes document a visitor verse. His final headlining launch was “Look Ma No Fingers,” an EP of turbulent jazz compositions he uploaded free of charge to SoundCloud on Mom’s Day, in 2018. Largely, he’s been a presence on the social-media feeds of followers, who’ve occurred upon him doing on a regular basis issues, like fetching espresso or strolling within the park. As a rule, his companion is a flute, which he performs with a form of blissful ignorance to his environment.
That Benjamin has appeared a reclusive thriller since OutKast’s heyday says extra about our expectations for the well-known, for whom performative oversharing is now a part of any new-release cycle, than the alternatives he’s made. And his new album, “New Blue Solar,” is certainly a alternative. There’s no singing or rapping, as he forewarns on the lead monitor, which is titled “I Swear, I Actually Wished To Make A ‘Rap’ Album However This Is Actually The Approach The Wind Blew Me This Time.” As a substitute, the document is sort of an hour and a half of deeply soothing instrumental music on which he performs a wide range of woodwinds. The flute, he’s defined, is a approach to commune with the air round him, to expertise the feeling of breath, in addition to a coping mechanism for social nervousness. Past that, he feels as if he’s run out of issues to rap about. In an interview about his formal return, he mentioned the contours of middle-aged life couldn’t coalesce into bars: he felt rapping about his life now—colonoscopies, worsening eyesight—appeared ill-advised.
Most individuals would fortunately hearken to him rap about such issues. However followers know him effectively sufficient to acknowledge that he’s past doing issues simply to do them. He and Antwan Patton, also referred to as Large Boi, his accomplice in OutKast, by no means would have made it past their southwest Atlanta neighborhood in the event that they’d been overly acutely aware of expectation. Within the early nineties, when hip-hop was synonymous with New York and, to a lesser extent, Los Angeles, success was a far-fetched dream for a pair of children from the South. However OutKast turned one of the crucial exhilarating rap duos ever, a shape-shifting marvel, pimps one second and aliens the following, streetwise however with their eyes to the cosmos, righteous but acutely aware of their very own contradictions. They felt a real partnership, teen-age associates whose contrasting voices and types each challenged and complemented each other. In 2003, “Hey Ya!”—a garage-pop gem that was basically an André 3000 solo monitor—turned OutKast into an inescapable cultural phenomenon. Their final album collectively was “Idlewild,” launched in 2006, the companion to a trippy, ignored movie of the identical identify set in a postmodern, Despair-era juke joint. In 2014, they briefly reunited for an underwhelming efficiency at Coachella.
OutKast has by no means felt irrelevant as a result of their lineage has remained so clear. Large Boi has continued recording and touring, and artists like Future and Killer Mike are related to the Dungeon Household, the unfastened Atlanta collective of rappers, producers, and singers that features OutKast. The duo’s iconoclasm lives on within the storytelling approaches of Frank Ocean or Kendrick Lamar, the perspective and flamboyance of Tyler, the Creator; Lil Yachty; or Teezo Landing. There’s hardly ever been a way of acrimony between Patton and Benjamin, simply deviating ambitions. One in every of Benjamin’s most notable current appearances was as an actor in Kelly Reichardt’s 2022 movie “Exhibiting Up,” a quiet, absorbing meditation on artwork and inventive course of. Benjamin performs Eric, a ceramicist, whose chill, fastidious vibe is balm-like amid the movie’s petty rivalries and under-the-surface tensions. “He simply performs this flute every time he’s not working,” Reichardt mentioned in an interview. “That was form of a soundscape for lots of taking pictures.” Someday, he let the movie crew document as he performed in a discipline, and Reichardt used a few of these sounds within the movie. She remembered his enthusiasm and curiosity as he turned immersed in ceramics whereas making ready for the position. “Aw, man, clay,” she recalled him texting her after a day spent practising for his half. “I knew I’d have an interest on this.”
We’d all be fortunate to have so many pursuits, and in addition the time and inclination to discover them. “New Blue Solar” is the product of Benjamin’s life in Los Angeles, the place he has lived for the previous few years. It attracts on the overlapping native scenes that discover the intersection of devotional music, jazz, and ambient experimentation. There may be, typical of the trade these days, a restricted version on vinyl. Nevertheless it’s a modest album that asks for little past our time and a spotlight.
The tracks are largely improvised. Lots of them are constructed upon the synths of Surya Botofasina, a keyboardist who studied with Alice Coltrane, later often known as Swamini Turiyasangitananda, at her ashram within the Santa Monica mountains. (Botofasina’s 2022 album “Everybody’s Kids” seems like a religious predecessor to “New Blue Solar.”) Carlos Niño, a revered composer and bandleader, contributes bells, chimes, and percussion. Nate Mercereau, as able to liberated shredding as ambient, feedback-drenched howls—he as soon as recorded a “duet” with the Golden Gate Bridge—performs guitar. Benjamin isn’t a virtuosic flautist, and he’s described the album as a doc of discovery. The Roland Aerophone Professional AE-30, a digital wind instrument that seems all through the challenge, is one thing that Benjamin began enjoying simply days earlier than the album was recorded. On the opening monitor, it takes a few minutes for him to hitch the fray, and when he begins enjoying it sounds tentative and exploratory. His presence is usually playful, decorative. On “Ninety Three ’Til Infinity And Beyoncé,” a easy, lurching synth line repeats as Benjamin’s woodwinds wend and weave their manner round it.
For all its associations with peace and stasis, ambient or New Age music typically nonetheless aspires to be disruptive, if solely to reorient our perspective, our sense of time. Typically epiphany arrives when a motif repeats so typically {that a} slight change feels radical and transcendent. It’s not onerous for this ensemble to sound good collectively—Botofasina’s euphoric, shifting layers of synth imply that “New Blue Solar” is, at a baseline stage, fairly lovely. It’s extra of a problem to evoke feeling, to arrest the listener, and Benjamin’s ensemble often reaches these celestial highs. “BuyPoloDisorder’s Daughter Wears a 3000Ⓡ Shirt Embroidered” begins with Benjamin’s flute exploring spooky terrains, and the group sounds as if it’s enjoying one thing generically ritualistic. However 4 minutes in, the synth surges to the entrance, after which once more a couple of minutes later, cresting in an ecstatic dirge paying homage to Coltrane’s nice devotional music.