As a flute player and admirer of the Atlanta hip-hop duo OutKast, I should be well placed to appreciate André 3000’s New Blue Sun. And so, if I audibly scratch my head over the course of the ensuing paragraphs, please consider this a gesture of respect to an artist who has taken a sharp left turn away from the gilded path. André is a quirky and chameleonic rapper, lodged in public memory for his persona on “Hey Ya” and for the ubiquity of this and other OutKast releases over the past thirty years. But as he titles the first track of New Blue Sun: “I swear, I Really Wanted to Make a ‘Rap’ Album But This is Literally the Way the Wind Blew Me This Time.”
Or perhaps metaphorically? Then again, this is purportedly a flute album, on which the wind doth blow from time to time, even though the instrument is frequently a digital simulacrum. On “I Swear…,” it is probably a Roland Aerophone Pro, whose tone is as queasy as melting viscose, pitched organologically between the theremin and one of those electronic bird chirper toys that plot to plasticize the avian kingdom. As album openers go, it is hazy, disquietingly on the edge of massage parlor or yoga studio harmonies, though if you were to reroute the piano part from OutKast’s debut single, “Player’s Ball” (1993), through an ambient pad setting on your home synthesizer, the results would be similar. I’m also reminded, if only obliquely, of Alice Coltrane’s Turiya Sings, an album of devotional chants, originally issued in 1982 on cassette by her Avatar Book Institute and more recently reissued, without the magisterial strings, as an Impulse! Records CD. There is a similar sense of unfolding warmth. A door opens and you sense how blissful it might be to step across the threshold, despite the querulous meanderings of that Aerophone Pro.
Much as I love Alice Coltrane’s music I never felt inclined to take that step and join her ashram (not that I was invited). Equally, I have a vague awareness of the Los Angeles wellness community out of which New Blue Sun emerges and a correspondingly vague desire to hold it at arm’s length, if only to hear more clearly. Musicians with sufficient conviction can issue the listener a temporary passport to balm, tranquility, and the exotic but let’s give space to healthy skepticism. The second track—“The Slang Word P(*)ssy Rolls Off the Tongue With Far Better Ease Than The Proper Word Vagina. Do You Agree?” (and from now on I will abbreviate these titles, do you agree?)—reminds me that there is a Black exotica/ambient tradition, rarely acknowledged in histories of such genres. A nonexhaustive list might include John and Alice Coltrane, Sun Ra, Don Cherry, Pharoah Sanders, Lonnie Liston Smith, Yusef Lateef, Dorothy Ashby, Laraaji, Earl Grant, William Grant Still, Roland Hayes, Don Shirley, Duke Ellington, even, at times, Miles Davis and Charlie Parker—listen, for example, to Davis’s “Ife,” “Gondwana,” or “He Loved Him Madly,” or Parker’s recordings with strings. “The Slang Word…” occupies similar territory, but it also overlaps with those Blaxploitation soundtracks with generic cues called something like “Love Theme,” its lush soft-furnishings leading via the meditation room to the boudoir—and why not?
There is a broader essay to be sketched here about plausible connections between such disparate Black artists and their complicating relationship to ambient, exotica, and new age musics. By definition, exotica is a colonial, or postcolonial, style rooted in stereotype and caricature, an outsider’s image of otherness. Yet Black artists have challenged this tacit agenda. According to his biographer John F. Szwed, Sun Ra was inspired by the lush mood music of white composers such as David Rose, Walter Schumann, and particularly Les Baxter, who offered a dubiously attractive mélange of Afro-Cuban rhythms, outer space themes, orientalist melodies, and “indigenous” instrumentation. But Ra aligned this influence with his broader vision of Black time travel. If life on earth was hell, let’s move to distant planets or ancient Egypt. His science fiction was fact, he claimed. With stately melodies, massed flutes, florid piano, and pan-African percussion, tracks such as “The Nile,” “Tiny Pyramids,” “Friendly Galaxy,” and “Paradise” redrew maps charted by slavers and settler colonialists.
To some degree, New Blue Sun sits within this tradition and should be applauded for that. Striking out for the unknown, it eschews the unforgiving crunch of contemporary digital music in favor of all that floats and drifts. Nevertheless there are problems of execution. Take tracks three and four, “That Night in Hawaii…” and “BuyPoloDisorder’s…” Motifs enter and dematerialize seemingly at random: digital twittering reminiscent of Disney birds in Cinderella, an overly insistent cuckoo-clock flute, flashes of eye-blazing Vangelis-style keyboards that evoke the Blade Runner off-world colony. Attractive chord sequences float up to the surface like iridescent jellyfish—Hey! Come play with me!—only to be swamped by creatures with other things on their minds. Amorphous is one thing; shapeless is another. To sustain attention, improvisations or semi-improvisations—if this is what these tracks are—should be taut and closely entwined. Here, instead, they are often fogged, drifting as if soaked in gong bath culture, serving relaxation more than discernment. The paradox is that this structural confusion is neither relaxing nor satisfying.
Of course these are personal reactions. Other listeners may feel they are plunged into the teeming cosmos. But casting back to OutKast at their peak makes me wonder about the watery meanders of New Blue Sun. Perhaps the economic production, irresistible bounce, and admirably compressed stories of “Ms. Jackson” or “So Fresh, So Clean” and “SpottieOttieDopaliscious”—“put your pimpin’ down” smashed together with “space futuristic type things,” to borrow their own words—were perfect to a restrictive degree. Where next to go? The unfocused sound of New Blue Sun may be the pattering of baby steps made by a questing musician learning a new form of experimentation. The record exudes a post-pandemic aura, perhaps acknowledging the effects—fragmentation, solipsism, confusion—of global withdrawal from social contact toxically entwined with digital information overload.
What about these titles? Do they offer any clarification? André’s “Ninety Three ’Til Infinity and Beyoncé” recalls a famous hip-hop track from 1993 by a young, optimistic Oakland crew named Souls of Mischief. Their original chorus, a repeated “This is how we chill from 93 Till…,” is completed here by the words of Buzz Lightyear, whose catchphrase is pulled off-course by the magnetic power of planet Beyoncé. Shorter than anything else on the album at three minutes and fifty seconds, “Ninety Three…” opens with a slow-stepping bass line and mutating instrumentation: metallic violin (played, I assume, by V.C.R, also known as VtheMartian), flutter-tongue flutes (again, I’m guessing, but probably British winds and reeds virtuoso Shabaka Hutchings), arpeggiated keys, and sustained pads. The bass drops out midphrase two minutes and fourteen seconds in as if ascending to heaven, then returns, only to vanish once more. The effect is unsettling at first, suggesting forgetfulness or a provocative disruption. But its absence allows the remaining music a residual glow.
“Ghandi [sic], Dalai Lama…” adds piano and aerial voices to the flute’s refrain. In one respect, their contribution gives firmness to textures that are otherwise soft, malleable, and indistinct. They also raise a question I’ve pondered since first listening to the album: Why does everything sound muffled, as if recorded on somebody’s phone in a smoke-swathed apartment, doors open to the ocean? “Ants To You, Gods To Who?” is a case in point. Muted synth sounds shimmer and buzz, not unattractively, in a reverb-saturated mix that seems to place everything behind everything else. It could almost be a sensual Isley Brothers ballad, with Ronald poised to sing if only he could find an opening between the sheets. This yearning floats in infinite space, an interplanetary craft piloted by the ghost of Karen Carpenter.
Given the right substances I suppose one could sail away to the far territories on these clotted, blurry mixes. Personally I yearn for a touch of clarity. As with much new age music, the formula is to place the listener in a holding pattern, a tidal drift that never hits landfall. By contrast, Hutchings has recently released two records that are exemplary in their cohesion and groundedness: Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace (2024), and Afrikan Culture (2022). Listen, for example, to “Black Meditation,” the lead track from the latter, on which multiple flutes weave in vibrant plant life under a somber, beautifully executed clarinet melody. All is settled in its place, fibrous, pliant, strong, and yet its fluency suggests multitudinous directions, abrasive, disturbing, tender, and devotional. It performs those qualities in which music excels, combining materiality, evanescence, and temporality to address human complexity on many levels simultaneously.
And so we end with the final and longest track on New Blue Sun, “Dreams Once Buried…,” which is floatation exemplified. Guitar, flute, synths, and wind chimes all circle one another like birds in a cloudless sky. Occasionally you sense a person close to a microphone, adding little sounds of who knows what, objects hitting other objects. For the skeptical listener this is a welcome reminder that New Blue Sun is not AI-generated; it’s a bunch of humans improvising together in a studio. Their partial success may worry me into caveats and questions yet as a flute player and OutKast admirer I’m impressed.