- The New Jersey newcomer balances effervescent grooves with laid-back introspection.
- Hip-hop and dance music have always had a symbiotic relationship. Baltimore club can trace its origins back to hip-hop, and grainy electro underpinned the seminal early hip-hop of the '80s. Today, rappers digging for a nostalgic sample habitually turn to house.
New Jersey's JWords flits between these two worlds effortlessly. Her catalog connects traces of East Coast club, house and jungle. On the hip-hop end, she has tapped New York underground rappers like MIKE and maassai to rhyme over her genre-defying productions. On Sonic Liberation, JWords and her shiny gear are the central focus: the entire record was composed using her Eurorack and pocket operators.
Sonic Liberation partially exists in a drowsy state. The opener, "up late," incorporates a rounded, dub-adjacent sub-bass and lumbering percussion. The warbling synths of "time passin'" recall Eternity-era Alice Coltrane. Other tracks are more spritely. In "sonic cleanse *feels good*," warm melodies shoot up like sparkling water over a peppy bassline. Airy synths are interrupted, distorted and toppled over each other in "fed up," a track that maintains a lively groove underneath the ruckus.
"A lot of emotional relief came from these songs," JWords writes in the record's liner notes. This may explain why Sonic Liberation manages to feel both introspective and bursting with life, like several late-night revelations landing all at once.
トラックリスト01. Up Late
02. Settlement
03. Sonic Cleanse *Feels Good*
04. Forms
05. Time Passin'
06. Fed Up