Chants - Seven Spheres (2019)

Across three EPs for Astral Plane Recordings, Chants has marked a development from relative novice to one of the club music world’s most distinctive voices. August 23 will see the release of Seven Spheres, the Madison-based artist’s first album since 2015 and his most accomplished work to date for the label.

Melding experience working in the New Orleans second line tradition with an acute passion for all forms of rhythmic acceleration, Chants suffuses Seven Spheres with both a coiled, premeditated energy and bursts of spontaneous joy. Largely recorded at home and with friends, the percussion heard throughout the album is imbued with a beguiling tension: improvisational in spirit, but also rigorously gridded out for DJ play.

Meticulously workshopped from the ground up, Seven Spheres grew out of a series of sound design-focused drum tracks that developed into full fledged anthems like “Filament” and “Muzzoline”. Further experiments in speed and sub bass juxtaposition begat “Seven Spheres” and “Assiah Dance”, the spiritual core of the record and two tracks that have been hammered in mixes and radio by us and others.

At eight songs, Seven Spheres is a tight bundle, built out of individual tracks that show a remarkable plasticity in relation to every other track on the album. Having experimented in texture, structure, and tempo, the album is stylistically broad, yet singular in approach: the result of a labor of love and a long-held desire to design dancefloor-functional music. Seven Spheres is out on all digital platforms on August 23.