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About The Album
John Coltrane once claimed that you could play a shoestring if you’re sincere, so imagine what a sincere, gifted, and unremittingly devoted artist can do with a drum machine, piano, and 13 musicians at his disposal. With The Sound of Lasso, the Michigan composer, The Lasso, has turned these intangible emotions into lush wordless symphonies.
It’s a sound that’s capable of channeling both the beauty of a frozen great lake and the warmth of a tropical savannah; it’s psychedelic and eerily comforting, chameleonic but unmistakably the vision of a laser-focused mind. A melodic cauldron of lo-fi instrumental hip-hop, face melting beat music, tribal funk, future jazz, and Boards of Canada-style IDM blasted into the frigid unknown. The sort of record that proves that genre isn’t real but the soul is an immutable concept.
Recorded in eight weeks across Michigan, The Sound of Lasso was made with 13 musicians culled from an earlier era of his musical life—a sound that embodied the snow-fringed backwoods majesty of his childhood. There are no actual words, but the weightless voice of Sam Cooper chimes in like gorgeous ghostly choir, as distant memories and evocative landscapes swirl past in the mind’s eye.
Removed from the constraints of formatting instrumentals to fit hooks, bars, and songs, The Lasso was liberated to capture an atmosphere and emotion that can’t be stated with syllables. It’s the liminal blur between sleep and sentience, the stunned shock that causes the hairs on your arms to stand stiff as bayonets, the narcotic twilight ambience of depression and the euphoric serotonin blitz of falling in love. The sum of human emotion artfully distilled into three-minute suites.
But that’s just the start. This is sound as color, color as deep refracting groove, sound as soul music that penetrates to the marrow. The sound of Lasso at his solstice, unbound from gravity and always timeless.
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