Title: Lily
Artist: Anitek
Released: May 2013
Genre: Downtempo | Trip Hop
Label: Dusted Wax Kingdom
Catalog Number: DWK211
License: CC BY-NC-SA
The folks over at Dusted Wax Kingdom are quickly rising to the upper levels of my favorite Netlabels. Looking at their recent releases, I’ve download about two thirds of them. Several more are in my evaluation queue, and tracks from all of them found their way on to my show recently.
However, I just found this release wasn’t exclusive to DWK, it was released by the artist on Jamendo in April (linked above). Still, no matter, DWK has excellent taste in releases and I would likely not have noticed Anitek if they hadn’t released Lily on their label.
Anitek is a producer / DJ from Morristown, New Jersey who has played piano for 15 years, and been releasing his music on Jamendo since 2010. (He has a whopping 24 releases posted on Jamendo.) He has an extremely wide range of influences, everything from Rachmaninoff to trip-hop, with healthy doses of blues, jazz, funk, and lounge just to name a few more.
On Lily, Anitek has worked with some of his favorite collaborators: Tab, DSpliff and Lyrcisit to create a massive 20 tracks of mellow-chill-groove dedicated to his new daughter, who the release is titled after.
There are lots of DJ / Producers on the air these days. Anitek might be lost in the melange of all the sounds that are out there. However, he stands out as one of the few that is truly producing transformational work that puts him in the class of DJ Shadow, Kruder & Dorfmeister, an Thievery Corporation.
What is really nice about this work is that Anitek uses so many samples and styles of music, you might recognize parts of each track and yet not be able to name the original recordings they came from. In some cases, you might even be fooled because of his use of a sample on more than one track. (For example the female vocal on the track Overt is also used on the track Mocci. Although the tempo is completely different, so they don’t sound identical, but it is enough to give you a sense of déjà vu.)
I mentioned that I played a track from Lily on my last CerebralMix show. The track was Disconcert, and it was the opening track for the second hour of the show. I know this won’t be the last track I play by Anitek, I easily see his work as the kind of soundtrack that works it’s way into my life and my shows on a regular basis.
Do I need to offer any more of a recommendation than that? I certainly hope not, but I will close with one more anyway. I started listening to trip-hop, chill and down-tempo releases about six or seven years ago. Had Anitek been releasing works that far back, I probably would have been even more engrossed in this genre than I already am. This is an outstanding release in every way. I can’t wait to dig into his back catalog and catch up on what I’ve been missing.
Anitek: Lily
Free / Donation
8.5
