The smooth and hypnotic tracks on the Queens-based producer’s new album share a single tempo and palette—part tropical strut, part moonwalk.
DJ Python calls his music “deep reggaeton”: a fusion of reggaeton’s dembow rhythm with the ethereal electronics of ambient and classic IDM. Python—aka Brian Piñeyro, a New Yorker of Ecuadorean and Argentine extraction—spent part of his adolescence in Miami, where the ubiquitous reggaeton beat soundtracked a growing interest in his own Latinx heritage. Once he learned that his friend Anthony Naples, who runs the Incienso and Proibito labels, was a south Florida native, Piñeyro decided to make a reggaeton record for him, but one rooted in underground house and techno. The result was Python’s 2017 debut album, Dulce Compañia, which paired loping dembow cadences with wistful, watery synths; last year’s Derretirse ventured deeper into his imagined subgenre. He’s gotten a remarkable amount of mileage out of the marriage of the two styles, and on Mas Amable he breaks new ground by slowing the tempo further.
By virtually any metric, this is Python’s simplest record yet. All eight tracks share a single tempo and palette—part tropical strut, part moonwalk—and they’ve been seamlessly mixed together in the manner of a DJ set or a live electronic performance. In fact, it’s debatable whether these could even be classified as distinct songs, or whether they simply constitute one very long composition. It feels in many ways like a 48-minute single, the kind of thing that used to seem so audacious in Ricardo Villalobos’ hands. But there’s nothing audacious about Mas Amable. It’s smooth. Python’s music has always been hypnotic, but Mas Amable is particularly spellbinding, interweaving contrasting synth parts and percussion patterns so subtly that you’re barely aware of the changes.
The record begins with a beatless ambient introduction of gentle synth pads and soft, rainy rustling noises; the scene might be a distant forest clearing or just a backyard in Queens. There’s something appealing about the placelessness; the open-ended setting doesn’t impose a mood so much as invite you to project your own state of mind onto the scene. With the second track, “Pia,” the pensive atmospheres persist even as the drums kick in, tough and unadorned. For a time, the fog burns off, and wistful synths give way to sterner textures: scratchy, insect-like shakers and buzzing, bit-crushed croaks, like robotic frogs. Minimalist synth melodies evoke melancholy ’90s worksrecordings by Autechre, Boards of Canada, and Disjecta. Every so often, a forlorn whistle streaks through the frame, like a freight train in the dead of night.
The album’s desolate centerpiece, “ADMSDP,” is even more evocative of witching-hour loneliness. Everything falls silent except for the drums, making room for a spooky monologue from the poet LA Warman. “Where was the place where you felt OK?” she murmurs, her voice slow and low, evoking an ASMR video. “Go to this place.” As guided meditations go, it is both bleak and empathic. It’s OK to sleep the entire day, she tells us—to cry on the train, to think life has no meaning but suffering. “It’s OK to feel hopeless, because the world is hopeless. It’s OK to think about dying.”
It’s a striking moment, a strange fusion of death-metal nihilism with new-age textures and tropical rhythms, though it doesn’t last long: Soon she is urging us to reconnect with our bodies—“to feel how soft you are, how warm you are, how smooth your surfaces are.” As if in response, the music warms, too: rosy new chords rise in the mix, and the rhythm slackens, as though a pinched nerve had suddenly been massaged away. The remainder of the album is a gentle denouement, a return to the ambient overtones of the record’s introduction. That full-circle journey makes for a curious record: It doesn’t do much, yet it covers a surprising amount of ground. By stripping away everything extraneous, Piñeyro has further refined the sound of his invented genre. Deep reggaeton has never sounded deeper.
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