"I Swear, I Really Wanted To Make A 'Rap' Album But This Is Literally The Way The Wind Blew Me This Time. Thus the title of the first piece on the album by celebrated American rapper and actor André Lauren Benjamin, known as André 3000 from
Outkast, among others. New Blue Sun is a full-blooded ambient and new age album on which Benjamin mainly plays a variety of exotic flutes. You read it right:
flutes. Not surprisingly, his main partner in crime is California neo-new age musician Carlos Niño. But the increasingly flute-focused afro-British jazz blazer Shabaka Hutchings is also on hand in a collection of drawn-out soundscapes sometimes reminiscent of the early ambient albums of Brian Eno and the cassette culture of new age and world music of the 1980s. The absurdist and lengthy titles indicate that the charge is not meant to be as floaty as it sounds or that André 3000 ran out of words for a while. New Blue Sun is an inspired double album for endless absorption and dreaming away. (MR)more
