André Benjamin, because the hip-hop legend is legally named, introduced his foray into ambient New Age jazz in an NPR interview: “I don’t wish to troll individuals,” he mentioned. “I don’t need individuals to assume, Oh, this André 3000 album is coming! And also you play it and like, Oh man, no verses. So even truly on the packaging, you’ll see it says, ‘Warning: no bars.’”
André 3000 has labored on just a few tasks since he stopped making music together with his OutKast accomplice, Large Boi, practically twenty years in the past. He was featured on songs by Beyoncé (2011) and John Legend (2008), and he dropped an EP in 2018. Of late, he’s largely been seen on social media, the place followers doc sightings of him taking part in the flute in seemingly random locations equivalent to New York and Japan.
“I’ve been curious about winds for a very long time, so it was only a pure development for me to enter flutes,” he mentioned in a information launch. “I similar to messing with devices and I gravitated largely towards wind.”
He added that he owns “about 30, 40 flutes” and will probably be showcasing his wooden, bamboo and Mayan flute-playing abilities within the album co-produced by prolific experimental jazz artist Carlos Niño.
The album will function eight tracks, with titles as unconventional because the hip-hop artist. “New Blue Solar” will open with a 12-minute tune referred to as “I Swear, I Actually Needed to Make a ‘Rap’ Album However This Is Actually the Manner the Wind Blew Me This Time” and different melodies named “Ghandi, Dalai Lama, Your Lord & Savior J.C. / Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and John Wayne Gacy” — which the announcement says “has a haunted aura,” and “Ants to You, Gods to Who?”
André 3000 acknowledged that the album will probably be a departure from the work that catapulted him to fame. OutKast, the Grammy-winning hip-hop duo finest identified for 1990s and 2000s hits equivalent to “Hey Ya!,” “ATLiens” and “Ms. Jackson,” break up after the discharge of their sixth album, “Idlewild,” in 2006. Their ambiguous finish, broadly rumored to be due to artistic variations, was as soon as parodied in a “Key & Peele” sketch.
André 3000 doesn’t plan to by no means rap once more, in keeping with his information launch, however he needs listeners to “decelerate, reset and sit nonetheless.”
“It’s therapeutic to be in that setting and taking part in and having to be absolutely within the second,” he mentioned. “Don’t take into consideration the longer term, don’t take into consideration the previous. There’s one thing about figuring out that this was created with none of the individuals figuring out what was coming. It’s simply stunning to listen to a pure occurring.”