The Queens-based producer Alex Dadras has cast a wide net. Working across New York’s rap and experimental scenes, he’s collaborated with everyone from A$AP Rocky to Eartheater to Show Me the Body. In the process, Dadras has developed a unique and versatile sound of the sort that can only be incubated in a place like New York City, blending house, hip-hop, and dancehall with a wide palette of samples. But his new album Holy Wind seems to unfold in a place far from the steel-and-concrete landscape that’s shaped his career.
There’s a clear ecological theme running through the album, from the song titles to its all-encompassing ambience. The elusive effects and samples Dadras uses sound like they could be field recordings or purely digital creations: flutes mix with high-pitched chirps, and kick drums blend with the creaking of trees. His compositional approach resembles an evolutionary process— on tracks like “Bird Strike” and “Eucalyptus,” he takes the sound of wildlife and organizes it into the rhythms of human life.
Holy Wind isn’t strictly a dance record. The percussion is varied, and when Dadras slows down the tempo, his compositions mutate into darker and more haunting territory. The brightness of the album’s first half recedes into the foliage as you descend further into it; “Jungle Sweat” is a torrent of drones, rumbles, and wails over an almost-military drumline.
The natural and the digital come together on tracks like “Labyrinth,” blending 808 cowbells and inscrutable vocal fragments. Electronic bleeps and bloops dissolve into the hum of nature. On “Pyrrhic,” a lower BPM, dancehall-like beat is paired with a clipped and compressed vocal sample, as cascading synthesizers roll in like the tide. “Sloth” and “Bird Strike” are experimental and strange, but sound much closer to hip-hop beats, evidence of Dadras’ fluidity and flexibility.
There are occasionally clearer samples of the human voice — a segment of John Lurie’s surreal and underrated travel program Fishing With John on “Fishing,” a snatch of a Charlie Brown special on “Bottle Princess,” what sounds like a nature documentary on “For the Frogs.” But mostly Holy Wind is guided less by a human touch and more the world around it. Pulling from our recollections and imaginations of nature, Dadras is able to conjure a vivid environment that’s palpable and felt even inside city limits.
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