Ben Sloan is a percussionist whose touch is so light and musical that it melts the border between beat and melody. In his collaborations with other artists, from the National and Moses Sumney to producers like Mouse on Mars, you can consistently hear a musical intelligence seeking the point where the drums fuse into the texture of the song. He’s on a short list of drummers, along with Liturgy’s Greg Fox, whose extended solos you can easily imagine taking center stage.
On his debut full-length, muted colors, Sloan brings his impulse for melodic and rhythmic communion to a piece of software called Sensory Percussion, which can transform drumming into a blurting saxophone, a ghostly synth pad, or a crying voice, all in real time. It’s a kick to hear him wield this tool across the glitchy, dreamy surface of muted colors. Sloan says the album’s music was “culled from his digital scrapbook”—“old hard drives, folders, field recordings, studio sessions, and countless voice memos”—and he’s stitched these ephemera into a loose tapestry full of stray threads of mumbled voices and flute sounds. The music floats by in a genial haze, with bits of color and life flashing by at the edges of your attention.
The mood isn’t too far off from what used to be called, in the early ’00s, “laptop pop”—Boards of Canada, the Books, Cornelius. Sloan loves incidental sounds, and the album is a tiny crawling sensorium full of them: on “Who’s Melting,” you hear what sounds like change falling out of pockets, fingers drumming a desktop, and what could be a passing car as captured on an iPhone through a pants pocket. You don’t actively listen to the result so much as notice it from time to time.
Sloan invites a handful of guests and friends to drop by, and the album grows more vivid and focused whenever they appear. Serengeti and Josiah Wolf of WHY? tag “Too Much Internet” with soft, motormouth rapping, and it sounds amusingly like a Death Grips song muttering to itself at the library. Madeline Kenney’s cool-blue vocals on “1e&a” evoke Feist’s collaborations with Broken Social Scene. Moses Sumney brings his unholy charisma to “Philistine,” reminding you that any song he appears on automatically becomes his own.
Sloan himself seems to have modest aims for the album—he’s called each track “a little colorful, sensational world to briefly indulge.” That feels exactly right. If you have half an hour of aimless transit and a window to stare out of, muted colors makes pleasant, and evocative, company.
