Sun Araw - ON PATROL
Not unlike (but not to be confused with) the interstellar sounds of a certain similar-named jazz traveler, Long Beach-based Sun Araw is one-man, cosmic-jam brainchild of Cameron Stallones, who has been foraging in the deep and murky seas of afrobeat, dub, and free-range psychedelics for several years on his own with steadily increasing returns. If you’re curious, yes, they both do travel the spaceways, from planet to planet.
Sun Araw’s last opus, Heavy Deeds, was indeed that, a thick tar of Congo-via-Cali, distorted fart-beats that could be heard and smelled three blocks away. On Patrol doesn’t retreat from the harmonic convergence, if anything, Stallones seems intent on a more blunt demonstration of his cherry-picked musical mindspace. Taking liberties—deserved or not—is what Stallones thrives on throughout this sprawling 2xLP set, nicking a menu of memorable outre moments of the last three decades into homebrew lab of looped organs, electro-jazz spacefunk, and pungent wafts of peyote wah-wah. The mood is set early with Ma Holo, a eight-minute, slow-burn that works a sparse, drowsy juju beat (though King Sunny Ade might recoil). By the end of side one, Stallones steps up the bpm into a Konono-style stomp (Beat Cop) that eventually falls in on itself. Further excursions swim a bongwater trench (The Stakeout) and claw at a mystical, New Age utopia rife with, yes, Zamfir-style flute shredding (Conga Mind, Dimension Alley).
Call it dub noise, West African drone, West Coast art school confidential, or music to take drugs to make music to, Sun Araw is all of these and none of these, in one fell swoop. What sets On Patrol apart is its ability to pre-sort (and then swiftly and ably create) a bucket of far-flung sounds that is hyper-current, and doesn’t come off as hack, dabbling, or rudely juxtaposed.
Likewise, the sort of metphysical relocation that Stallones attempts—transporting us to another continent, planet, time/space continuum—via his home studio is noble work. That he can create throbbing mini-masterpieces (and album high point) like Deep Cover, with its thick, rub-a-dub of 10 intertwined astral melody projections, all of which never fails to transport me somewhere else (but certainly not Long Beach) is cause for celebration.
