Tommy Awards: Sessions
Nuearth Conservatory
Issued on Nuearth Kitchen's new sister label Nuearth Conservatory, this half-hour set of four untitled tracks arrives courtesy of Stockholm, Sweden duo Tommy Awards, who laid down the material during a live jam for Made Like A Tree's podcast series in early 2013. Having refined the raw materials from that session into the EP's luxurious presentation, the duo's debut release oozes a relaxed charm and hypnotic allure that goes down as smoothly as a New Age narcotic.
Emerging with a whoosh, the opening track lays out a spooky synth riff to set the scene before warming the zone with a gently loping groove, its percussive details offset by goblin-esque atmospheres. In contrast to the bifurcated character of the opener, the EP's remaining tracks opt for a more straight-up Balearic vibe, beginning with the sun-drenched second and its sultry evocation of a serene seaside setting (symphonic synths and congas'll do that) and carrying on into the more explicitly beatcentric third and its foreboding ice-synth dramatics. But the opening three, however, feel like warm-ups once the fourteen-minute closer appears to envelop the listener with a gently surging pulse and sweeping string washes. One can certainly imagine worse fates than being transported by Tommy Awards' epic house chug to some heavenly paradise far beyond the clouds.February 2014