Lost Leaders swirls in your ears like an iridescent blizzard coating the slopes on a poly vector mountain. The tracks go by in a flurry, but listening to them is like looking at a snowflake under a microscope: ornate and crystalline, each with a captivating structure all its own. Album opener "my city..." makes the EP's statement, jetting between distinct movements of soundscapes and jungle breaks with melodic panache. "who do you think you are I am" and "love exploring your slopes (Β°-Β°)._.)" run with the intricacy-laced with ornate digital synth lines and early 2010s cloud rap atmospherics βwhile "jazz... the improvisational standard" and "you want me?" put in the hard day's work banging jungle.
Composuresquad's Jermaine Collins offers Lost Leaders as "paying tribute to my people" as he puts it, a loving in memoriam to dear friends he lost this year: Chuck Trash: who founded blog Total Trash LTD and was instrumental in shaping Beloved Radio and Daniel Brookman: a key player in the 2014-2017 Chicago club scene who released music as DANNN. Jermaine bears his heart on this tribute by infusing the EP with sounds and atmospheres that have felt profound to him since childhood. Jungle was his first love in electronic music, after he discovered it on Windows Media Player around age 11 or 12. Video game jungle is the strain that most inspired these tracks, like Soichi Terada's score for Ape Escape 3, Machinegirl's Neon White OSTs, the Sega game Space Channel 5, and the Final Fantasy series. He channels those vibes with the help of software emulations of the synths and Amiga sampler that were used in the Y2K era. Ready raver one?
-Words by M. Sugarman
lizard label
Now officially out: the next Lizard Label by my amazing and amazingly talented friend, Composuresquad. Please check it out!!! ππ¦π
