Melo Zed our New Discovery

From South London comes a promising new voice of avant-garde music: MELO-ZED. The English producer and performer of only 21 years of age has developed a musical project around his experience as a classically trained guitar player and his interest for jazz, a combination which has shaped his very distinct character and caught our attention at WIDE.

 

MELO-ZED comes out of the background thanks to his exceptional prowess as a conceptual musician, making use of constant references to African-American music, such as hip-hop and soul, frequently featured in his musical productions, showing the artist’s main influences and sonic repertoire. All these play an essential role in his inspiration and drive to generate genuine results which, in turn, leave a delicate trail signaling back to their origin. This has brought forth a prevalence of experimental sounds, where the emotional load of lo-fi can easily be perceived along with the more rare use of recycled and relocated sounds drawn from everyday settings.

Melo-Zed our New Discovery

 

Another facet is the tension between the taste for classical jazz and soul sounds in contrast with  the urban and current day hip-hop, jazz hop and cool jazz, which makes the artist’s compositions and sonic building blocks very interesting to appreciate: there’s an underlying feeling that he never renounces to any of these distinct sensibilities, which reinforces another of his highlighted qualities as a musician: the inclusion of living sounds in a synthetically designed composition, functioning in a very deliberate and specific way.

 

All these elements, both MELO-ZED’s education and melomania contributed masterfully to his latest release, Eleven, through which a penchant for using cinematic images of the African and synthetic motives becomes visible, in which different sonic textures are painted atop of a canvas of mathematically incorrect but genuine noises.

 

Eleven is an EP exposing and proposing its creator’s entropic thought process, in which harmonies intertwine in with complicity and complexity, where the nimble hands of the producer seem to veneer the entirety of the tracks, from the beginning to the end, with each possessing a natural gleam.

The sound palette, which results from an extensive and careful work allows the listener to dive into a near-hypnagogic state in which the artist’s on-stage performance maturity may be carried across. The production also features vocal collaborations from Emmavie, Cari, Dani Sofiya and even the Nigerian-American soul duo VanJess.

 

Melo-Zed our New Discovery

 

Certainly, the EP’s composition allows to appreciate the tracks as a whole, whilst still providing a great degree of individuality to each, switching our focus from one to another and allowing the listeners to dig the different atmosphere which MELO-ZED has only begun delving on this debut release.