Which makes a bigger dent: the landscape on the imagination or the imagination on the landscape? When Adolph Zukor first headed out west, Hollywood was a desert. Put a little tinsel in the tree and it’s Christmas. But who needs tinsel — or Hollywood…or holidays — when the tree we’re talking about is a Dragon Blood tree?
On Travel, “Imagination is the theme,” writes (Solange and Blood Orange collaborator) John Carroll Kirby. A fleshy imagination, informed by experience and heightened by introspection, brought out from the quiet, largely “composed in a small village in Belize, where the only sounds were chickens and children and the occasional small boat on the river.”
Like Martin Denny’s Forbidden Island; Les Baxter’s Caribbean Moonlight; Piero Umiliani’s Africa; Haruomi Hosono, Shigeru Suzuki, and Tatsuro Yamashita’s Pacific, Kirby’s Travel provides the transportation for exotic transformation. It’s an easy escape.
Case in point: Socotra the island doesn’t need the song. “Socotra” the song doesn’t need the island. Together, what do we get? An extraterrestrial yet earthly encounter among endemic flora and golden synthesizers, and a worthy first tour stop from Kirby’s daydream archipelago.
Outside Insight will release Travel on October 27. Pre-order it here and, to kill time while you’re waiting, set sail for the aural island of “Socotra” as many times as you’d like, down below.
Travel tracklisting:
01. Shofar
02. Socotra
03. Poroy Station
04. Golden Ring
05. Essaouira
06. Colo River
07. Alexia
08. Lamanii
09. Shanghai
10. Kailashananda
More about: Blood Orange, John Carroll Kirby, Solange
