Khotin - Beautiful You - Transparent Red - VINYL LP

The singing of lullabies and children's songs knows no geographical boundaries. Featuring many young singers and their mothers, this compilation documents the sounds of playtime and bedtime from Africa, Portugal, the Middle East, Mongolia, Japan, Solomon Islands, and the Nunavut Territory of Canada. Game songs include Baka Pygmy children from Cameroon playing Inchthe water drumInch by splashing rhythmically in a river and Kanoukro girls from Côte d'Ivoire falling into each other's arms and then pushing away. Some songs are lullabies for calming children, while others are for amusing them. One even warns little girls against running away from their parents.

Since debuting his Khotin project in 2014, Edmonton's Dylan Khotin-Foote has fine-tuned an impressionistic, dream-like style of music that straddles multiple sonic worlds. His output often sways from gentle synthesized atmospherics to hypnotic, dance-minded frameworks. His self-released 2018 LP, Beautiful You, offered a study on melody and memory; the album's nostalgia-nudging use of passing environments, voices, and abstractions captivated a cult following, a rare 4.5 review in Resident Advisor and the attention of Ghostly International, who pressed the cassette on vinyl for wider circulation in 2019. Now, Khotin reveals his first collection of new material since the signing. The album is a fluid continuation of his blissful and melancholic songcraft, extended humbly and warmly, Finds You Well. As tongue-in-cheek as the title may appear, the phrase has haunted the producer for some time. Most often seen at the start of correspondence, the words InchI hope this email finds you wellInch can land with varying levels of sincerity, depending on context and mood. Khotin-Foote started to read the line more ominously during the onset of the pandemic. So, this set of music winks at both possibilities, mixing a platitude's opaque optimism with lurking uncertainty. Finds You Well can be heard in near-symmetrical halves it's 10 tracks represent the selections from a bounty of demos that, with less modes- ty, could have filled two records, one active and the other ambient. The resulting set isn't an even split but it's close. The A-side centers on the album's steadiest sequence of beat-centric material. InchIvory TowerInch is inextricably tied to benchmarks set by late '90s downtempo forerunners, spilling lucious and narcotic synth modulations across a sprinkler's spray of breakbeats. Khotin's sprightly melodic noodling brings that touchstone sound into vogue, bubbling up in fre

Canadian producer Dylan Khotin-Foote has kept his Khotin alias going for the better part of a decade; the impressionistic electronic project shifts with the movements in his life. Sometimes it leads, like when the club-friendly grooves of 2014's Hello World immersed him in the heart of Vancouver's underground dance scene, and sometimes it follows, like 2018's Beautiful You, a downtempo salve for DJ fatigue. His melodic sensibility and playful ear for atmosphere remain the rippling core of the project's fingerprint; whether beat-driven or ambient, a foggy smear or a dusted and pristine print, a Khotin track has a distinct and instantly recognizable swirl. During and after the 2020 of Finds You Well, his second LP on Ghostly International, Khotin-Foote settled back into a slower vibe in his hometown of Edmonton. Even before the pandemic, his pivots to softer production, and away from DJing, left him with fewer opportunities in Vancouver and club bookings overall, and as a self-identifying introvert, he was fine with that. But the change of pace did open space for Khotin-Foote to grapple with concepts of adulthood and career. At his lowest, he almost walked off this musical path altogether; instead, he doubled down on the craft - the tone, pacing, and dynamism of new material - arriving at a definitive full-length. With Spirit, Khotin releases himself from the pressure of expectation, fusing and refining everything we know about his music. The warmth and familiarity of Khotin's dreamy, dulcet style meet new ideas and frameworks, a natural progression, a modest revelation; Khotin confirms it is okay to move slowly and he's never sounded better doing it.The album title borrows from the Inch spiritInch mechanic in the video game World of Warcraft. When players die, they are prompted to their spirit and return as ghosts to find their corpses and come back to life. Kho