Teebs experiments once again with “E S T A R A”

By Jake Saunder

The songs from recording artist Mtendere Mandowa, better known by his professional moniker Teebs, often use seemingly random objects such as tape to achieve an experimental sound.

And if peeling tape to create music doesn’t help in revolutionizing the term experimental, nothing will.

Teebs released his second album “E S T A R A” on April 8 with this exact experimental atmosphere. The found-objects effect stirs in the background subtly and helps produce the dream-like vision of his sound.

Advertisement

Teebs accomplishes such things through his use of layering. In every track, he brings together a sway of sound like a sedative.

Teebs builds on the style that made his first album, 2010’s “Ardour,” highly anticipated. The soundscape he offers seems as though he has found a methodical formula, one that produces his desired effect.

Each track is masterfully and artistically composed in a deeply delicate way.

As an artist, Teebs’ past efforts have been subject to various versions. Though different remixes have rearranged his melodies, they always remain in a similar vein. His music is filled with pleasant harmonies, resounding in cycles. Each track boasts a powerful roster of polyphonic textures, with every song filled with the experimental and layered technique.

Teebs has produced many free-form tracks in a way that could be deemed grandiose. However, it is his mild and swaying instrumental sounds that make Teebs’ music so honest and raw.

At times, the tracks will swell like a rising ocean with breakers beating quickly and abruptly along the rocky shoreline, with an occasional soft and spiraling side.

In other accounts, Teebs’ music ignites into a fledging fire. These tracks are produced in spirited vigor that billows in ways that envelop the listener like a swirling black smoke kissing the lighted horizon.

Advertisement*

The album simply reverberates in all atmosphere, bringing with it entirely original soundscapes. Every song is illumined differently, though each varies with a steady beating of classically instrumental sounds, coupled with synthesizers in an altogether electronic domain.

It is lovely and pure brilliance. Since the album has been released, any listener may now let their own reality of auditory sensations transcend to the bright and blissfully melodic hallucinations through Teebs’ “E S T A R A.”

Jake Saunders can be reached at [email protected], on Twitter @saundersfj or at 536-3311 ext. 254

Advertisement