BMG Rights Management · 28 May 2021
Solomun puts horns on it
Ocean is soul music with a stiff kick underneath, and it sits on a record that deliberately sounds nothing like his sets.
There’s an inscription Mladen Solomun came across some years ago, and it hasn’t left him since: nobody is not loved.
That is what his second album is built around, and it arrived on 7 May, close to twelve years after the first one, which is a long time to leave between records for somebody who has never stopped working.
‘Ocean’ is the track it takes its name from. Horns cut through the middle of it while the kick underneath stays stiff and unhurried, and the whole arrangement is dressed in soul, not in the machinery you might reasonably have expected from him. It’s a strange, warm record.
If you came expecting the sets, don’t. The album runs through varied styles and influences, closer to a family tree of everything he has absorbed over a career than to any document of what he actually plays at the wrong end of a night. He has spent most of his life behind the decks and has nothing left to prove about filling a floor.
It’s out on NINL.
Give ‘Ocean’ a proper listen somewhere quiet before you ever hear it in a club.
