Shcaa shows off his artistry once more on stunning new album, ‘No Moon At All, What a Night’, which lands on Apollo on October 9th following two lead singles in September.
Paris based Shcaa makes abstract and emotional electronic music. The producer, composer and guitarist is meticulous in his use of space and time, arranging harmonies, rhythm and texture with a rare sensibility. He combines the synthetic and the organic in transcendent ways and has done so on the likes of Sharingtones, Archipel and Grow as well as R&S Records, where his ‘An Ungrateful Death’ single saw an electronic blues sound begin to coalesce. Now he makes the shift to R&S sister imprint Apollo Records with a new album that is heavily influenced by nocturnal urban moods and is taken from recording sessions first started in NYC in autumn 2017.
‘No Moon At All, What a Night’ is made up of dense synthesised soundscapes, layered with rich melodies and harmonies that were composed on guitar. The artist explains more, saying:
I wanted the album to reflect a certain period of my life, the process of recognizing illusions, leaving them behind, discerning the important things, like shapes emerging from the dark. It is less hidden behind experimentalism than my first one. It is more lyrical when it needs to be but also draws more openly on club energy in some instances.
The record opens with introspective and downbeat offering ‘Faroh’s Birds’ before melting into the lullaby like melodies and lilting grooves of ‘Auguries’ which is subtle yet uplifting. The off-beat ‘Moralia’ layers up more freeform and jazzy chords with lumpy rhythms and closely mic’ed vocals to enthralling effect. After the slick dub techno hypnosis of ‘Oons Ide’ come the gorgeous keys and spoken word vocal musings of ‘If You Fall’, then the lush piano interlude ‘Sometime’. The second half of this most alluring album takes in deep, driving rhythms on ‘Siskor,’ hot and steamy, lo-fi r&B on ‘When Eternity’ and cosmic soundscapes on ‘Until We Meet.’ Excellent breakbeats and pitch shifted vocal sounds make ‘Fantasia’ a dream-like trip then ‘Aurora’ closes with some eerie and cavernous ambient that provokes deep contemplation.
This album shows true artistic maturity and honest expression that results in a richly rewarding listen and another real winner from the Apollo label.