Calm - By Your Side (2018)

Snippets don't make justice to music but the world goes like this...

As always with Hell Yeah, the next release comes from an artist label boss Marco fell utterly in love with before forming a close musical relationship. His name is Calm, and this summer he releases his eighth studio album, 'By Your Side'. It is an effortlessly evocative long player and magical ten track trip into soothing sonic waters, glistening harmonies and horizontal rhythms.

Calm is Japanese artist Fukagawa Kiyotaka, someone who has been making deep house, ambient and downtempo grooves since the late nighties, and always teasing spine tingling emotions out of his machines. His last album—2015’s From My Window—cast a real spell on Marco and encouraged him to reach out. The pair eventually hooked up in Tokyo and found real musical kinship while playing records together.

“Apart being a wonderfully calm person, he went straight into my top five selectors,” says Marco. “His taste and music programming are simply delicious. His set was one aural discovery after the other.” The album comes with special artwork by Andrea Amaducci and takes in some sure-to-be-big tunes that are already being supported by those who know such as Moonboots, Chris Coco, Phil Mison, Mixmaster Morris.

Majestic opener ‘Space Is My Place’ transports you straight to a blue sky paradise with rippling chords reflecting the warm sun and is ripe to become a modern classic. From there Calm’s masterful synths keep you flat on your back and gazing up to the heavens as gently drums roll beneath the brilliant ’Afterglow and First Star’ and then ‘Ending of Summer, Beginning of Autumn’ is a little more reflective as it rues the end of warmer days.

‘Sky, Colour, Passing’ is floating celestial bliss with angelic harmonies, ‘Shadows and Lights’ is a lazy Sunday soundtrack with delicate piano keys and the gentle chug of ‘Before Landing’ glows with cosmic light and warms you with astral disco grooves that will be the jewel in any open air DJ set. After the sensuous moments of ‘Mellow Mellow Sadness’ encourage you to reach out and hug someone close, ‘Shade of Tree’ washes over you like a seaside breeze before the final two tracks layer up synth modulations and quietly epic guitars into rousing pieces of slow motion euphoria.

'By Your Side' is a quietly epic album of wide open synth tracks that reach for the skies and leave you castaway on a breathtaking desert island.