BLOG 21/03/2019
The Jan Diaries — Timeless Albums: As One, 21st Century Soul
The idea of the timeless album comes up often when Jan Kinčl talks with Matija Duić and Pytzek: a record made so well that it refuses to settle into a period or a genre, and which usually reaches only the listeners already inclined toward it. In March 2019 he devoted an entry of The Jan Diaries to his own best example — 21st Century Soul, the album Kirk Degiorgio released as As One on the Californian label Ubiquity in 2001. He was sixteen when it came out and missed it entirely; he only came to it years later, and now it follows him through the city and into club sets.
What the piece covers
Degiorgio is described as a British chameleon equally at home in Detroit techno and in funk, soul and fusion jazz, and the argument is that all of those are present in equal measure and woven together rather than alternated — which is precisely why the record does not date. The column then walks the tracklist. Another Revolution sets out the broken beat and jazz fusion axis and calls to mind Carl Craig’s remix of UFO and his Innerzone Orchestra work. Undefeated keeps the broken beat but pushes synthesisers and electronics forward. Problems, the first vocal, is hi-tech soul in Derrick May’s sense of the term, with an audible Stevie Wonder inheritance and an early, capable performance from Simon Jinadu.
From there it deepens. Music Is An Open Sky is Kinčl’s favourite for the way Degiorgio walks the line between techno and broken beat; In The Arms of You is barely two minutes of ambient he wishes were twice as long. The centrepiece is Amalia, a modern jazz piece written by somebody who came from electronic music, with double bass, drums, trumpet and Jamie Odell — Jimpster — on Rhodes. Like No Other is a slower relative of Music Is An Open Sky, I’ll Keep Lovin’ You brings back Jinadu and Odell and shows soul’s debt to both techno and house, and Contours starts in the album’s established atmosphere before accelerating into drum and bass and then into fast techno. House of Eternity stretches Another Revolution into something longer and hazier, and the skeletal ambient of Sixty-Seven closes the record.
The part that stayed
The Rhodes on Amalia gets the column’s only real superlative — “uspio je u jednoj stvari objasniti zašto su Rhodesi jedan od najljepših instrumenata na planeti”, Kinčl writes of Odell, crediting him with explaining in a single track why the instrument is one of the most beautiful on the planet. The point of the piece, stated plainly at the end, is that this is what happens when someone takes several genres seriously enough to understand them: the elegance erases the borders between them.
Read the full piece
The full column, in Croatian, is on Red Bull Croatia. Five minutes.
The Jan Diaries | Bezvremenski albumi: As One — 21st Century Soul → redbull.com