L.A.-based artist Mtendere Mandowa has always stood out from the Brainfeeder pack of weirdo hip-hop producers: his beats are shrouded in dewy mist and subtropical condensation rather than the crunchy boom-bap of producers like Flying Lotus or Samiyam. The way he uses filters and closely clipped loops has the effect of a pleasantly smudged watercolor painting (much like those he designs himself), vague hints of otherwise implacable sounds rotating and repeating in a whimsical way. It's eminently accessible music, full of tiny "eureka" moments of subtle bliss, deft touches, and minuscule finishes so that even a two-minute sketch could feel like a whole world waiting to be dissected. Alas, it's probably that part of his sound that most works against Teebs: His debut album, Ardour, was probably one of the most pleasant things released from this particular sector last year, but it was easy for track after track of dense nature-scapes to blur together and to lose sight of Teebs' own fascinating personality in the grand scheme of faceless beauty.
Part of the reason for that was Ardour's length-- at 18 tracks long, it was a hard album to digest without fatigue or boredom setting in, a record that could easily start to feel like style over substance. Whether it's a wise lesson learned or merely serendipity, Mandowa's quick successor is a 10-track, 30-minute affair and all the stronger for it. Collections 01, if you want to be nerdy about it, sits somewhere between an EP and a "mini-album," but a surprisingly cohesive statement like this exists outside the need for nit-picky classification. Teebs himself describes Collections 01 as "a side project or group of mine that just so happened to make the same exact music as I'm making now," and as bizarre a description as that is, given that the record features Rebekah Raff's harp and Brainfeeder-associated composer Austin Peralta, maybe it's justified.
While the music on Collections is very identifiably Teebs, it's not merely 10 more tracks of Ardour. Whether it's the presence of collaborators with discrete roles, maturity, or merely a different headspace, the tracks here feel grounded and focused, with more to hold onto even at their most weightless. The colorful, soft-focus smear is partly replaced with discrete space and Take "LSP", with Peralta, a track that incorporates the same kind of meandering chimes and aquatic nature sounds as so many tracks on Ardour, but now it feels like every element has newfound purpose. On this record, dulcet keyboards paint silky melodies like brushstrokes, the drearily rustling beats are sewn into the fabric rather than tacked on, and tracks have real beginnings and endings rather than just floating by. Texturally, it's some of Mandowa's most gripping material yet, like the simultaneously slamming yet impossibly airy "Pretty Polly" or the queasily determined sub-basslines on closing duo "Red Curbs Loop" and "Yellow More New".
It says something for the fleeting nature of Teebs' music that what, for most artists, would be a stop-gap release turns out to be an arresting career highlight. It might be a slight little package, but somehow it makes even more of an impact than its considerably larger sibling. Attractively structured, confident, and executed without the stoned daydreaming that defined Ardour, Collections marks a new high-water mark for a producer that was already eminently accessible. Even for those who aren't fans of the kind of rambling and tangential ADD music usually proffered by Brainfeeder, the little readjustment on Collections might be just enough to rope in former skeptics. Either way, his new record is another collection of effortlessly gorgeous ruminations on hip-hop expressed through thermal updrafts, babbling brooks, and cracking twigs: This time it just sounds like he knows his way around the forest a little better.
