Colectivo Zafra – Tiempo al Tiempo
“What good is music anyway? Why do you listen to it?” These may appear to be questions of an almost esoteric nature. But ask most people, and they’ll give you the same reply. They’ll tell you that they listen to music to make them feel good.
There’s an air of surrender in that commonly heard answer. Most people use music as a feel-good recipe for life’s troubles. It’s supposed to provide relief and not to interfere.
While this is, in some ways, understandable, it’s also a way of painting ourselves in a corner. If enjoying music requires no work on the listener’s part, are we condemned to just listen to the same uncomplicated tunes forever?
Colectivo Zafra’s “Tiempo al Tiempo” is certainly the work of a modern jazz band. But try to take that out of your mind for a second. Placed in any other context, Colectivo Zafra’s music would be enough to reel your imagination in. Place them as the backing band to a big pop or rock star, and everyone would cheer. Does it require work? Yes, and a bit of discomfort, too, if you’re only used to pop sounds. But the journey that they take listeners on more than makes up for the effort.
Disconnectica – Deviate
Art wasn’t for everyone, no matter how we’d like to pretend otherwise. Sure, your Oscar Wildes, Pablo Picassos, or Tristan Tzaras loved to talk about how they just wanted to make art for art’s sake, to explore new ways of seeing the world, or to reinterpret familiar formats. But there didn’t used to be many plainclothes artists, and very few of them would’ve volunteered to teach kids from disaffected families how to read, draw or sing.
In that sense, we are living through a Golden Age of Art. We are living through the first period, when art was truly a democratic medium. It’s just that there’s so much of it being made, that none of us can possibly find the time to examine and label all of it. The best that we can do is lovingly adopt artists and to remember to give them the affection that all of them need in order to keep making it.
Disconnectica’s “Deviate” is an exciting art-rock experiment. It won’t take any experience inside of a professional recording studio to identify this as a DYI, lo-fi work. And it won’t take much time spent acquiring higher education to label this as “artsy.” This is ambitious, bombastic, and low-key work. It is what Trent Reznor might do if he didn’t have the budget or backing of large corporations. And, it’s wholly interesting, the work of a true artist trying to find their voice. I’d advise adopting Disconnectica and their work now.
