Monday, October 24, 2011

DJ CAM - SEVEN

With Seven, DJ Cam serves up his most personal album since the acclaimed Substances. Inspired as ever by the original jazz and hip-hop influences that helped him become one of the founders of the trip-hop scene back in 1995, this new album is also full of exciting new musical and visual influences. As a mainstay of the French Touch (he started his career in the 1990s together with Daft Punk, Air, Cassius, Bob Sinclar...), DJ Cam has released six albums, helmed a number of side projects and given countless performances all around the world, helping him to acquire global notoriety. His 2002 single Summer in Paris with Anggun sold over a million copies and remains an emblematic tune of the Parisian dolce vita. He is now based in Los Angeles, where his musical and visual projects can converge, including production and remixes (Michael Jackson, Serge Gainsbourg, Air, Miles Davis...), sound design (Louis Vuitton, Cartier, Sephora, Agnès b...), soundtracks for both TV (CSI: Miami...) and cinema (Gus Van Sant, Wayne Wang...).

Seven has touches of well-crafted pop and folk (Swim, with vocals by by Stateless’ Chris James and a video directed by Sonia Sieff, reminds one of Radiohead, one of the album’s major influences. And Chris James is also present on Ghost and Uncomfortable), hints of old school electronica (Dreamcatcher), and cinematic ambient tracks that invite you to dream (Seven, California Dreaming). For a feminine touch, DJ Cam adds the vocals of Inlove, a new signing on his Inflamable label, and Nicolette, long-time collaborator with Massive Attack, the legendary group that DJ Cam feels closer to now than ever before, and to whom he dedicates the album. The jazzy style kicks into high gear about a quarter of the way in on the track featuring vocals by Nicolette, but the majority of the album has a more haunting, hypnotic mood. Includes "California Dreamin'", "Swim", "Ghost" and "Uncomfortable" feat Chris James, "Dreamcatcher", "Love" (feat Nicolette), "Seven", "1988" feat Inlove, "Fountainbleau" and "A Loop".

Written in Paris and Los Angeles, Seven is an album whose enveloping, melancholic tone and wide-open soundscapes are supposed to help make your mind wander. The release of the album is the moment for DJ Cam – who admits to spending as much time in art galleries as he does listening to and composing music – to show us his talents as a photographer through the Landscape Architecture project, a series of mysterious landscapes where nature and architecture intermingle in a ghost-like world. An exhibition is planned, and the visuals will projected on a big screen during DJ Cam’s concerts, as revealed for the first time at the SXSW festival last March.

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