Steve 'Flash' JuonIt’s a bit eerie to find out that so many hip-hop producers have embraced the chill, no rappers involved, ambient music aesthetic. I’ve already admitted I’m a fan of the atmospheric jazzy vibe and the fact it could make great background music for video games. I’m also concerned that the art of rapping has gone so far astray that a post-modern Jay Dilla or Nujabes would rather not even bother making beats for emcees. I both understand their frustration and worry about what it means for the future of rap music.
It’s hard to hold such concerns in mind for long though while listening to Kurt Stewart’s “Window Painting,” and that’s in part due to the length. Clocking in at approximately 17 minutes long, spread out over eight tracks, there’s really not enough time to ponder the future of the genre before it’s over. The best you can do in such a tight time constraint is lose yourself in a moment of mellow. The soft crackle of a stylus tracking around a record on “seasons come and go” is an obvious form of ASMR for people my age with my fondness for vinyl. Perhaps what that really means is that lo-fi hip-hop is meant for those who are getting old enough to be mistaken for boomers? It’s marketed as relaxing music for the young to study to though. Go figure.
Even though Stewart has nearly abused that trope by the time you reach “motions,” there’s nothing in his music that could make you angry about it. Instead he ends the presentation by introducing me to a new subliminal sensory stimuli — the sound of drumsticks either being scraped on glass or scraped against each other. I don’t know what kind of sticks they are (wooden, plastic, weighted) and quite frankly they’re undoubtedly digital reproductions and not analog versions captured live to mic. It doesn’t matter. It’s as delightful as the lightly played guitar notes.
“Window Painting” is a whole ass mood, and that mood is IDGAF about anything but smoking weed and listening to jams. The most aggressively titled song is “what!” and the only hard thing about it is the tapping of the snare drum and the vocal sample that occasionally utters the title. Otherwise it sounds like somebody composed it while watching a light rain bounce off their front window. Songs like “reset” make me feel like Stewart is jamming with Miles Davis, and if there’s a better compliment to end the review on than that, I’m not even going to look for it. It fits so it sits.