Debut album release on the Astro Nautico label, incorporating live improv ambient / new age synths and pads recorded to cassette with degraded, heady background sonics. Key tracks, like ‘Love Scene,’ recall soulful melodies of early smooth r’nb hits and the garbled tape themes of lost videocassettes, while many others veer into more meditative European realms, bringing to mind artists like Teddy Lasry and other French librarians. The tracks are aptly named; ‘Lullaby’ follows a playful lead above sleepyheaded swells. ‘580 Drive’ takes the listener on a foggy early morning commute through Oakland on the track’s namesake. Beneath the hazy synthwork of ‘Rated R’ exists a current of house music, an assertion substantiated by the artists’ previous work in the music of clubs rather than that of dreary bedrooms. With a motif of spaciousness and warmth, Teamwork is an album that is simultaneously soaring and subdued, evoking feelings of vaporous nostalgia. It’s the first hint of black-blue daylight seeping through a window overlooking the bay on a cold morning, punctuated by the waves lapping at the shore beneath. Eventually a storm rolls in and the birds retreat from the pouring rain. If Seph & Morgan are birds of a feather, then they most certainly flock together on Teamwork.
Purchase / Listen: Seph & Morgan – Teamwork
–written by GRKMYTH
Joyful Union Cassette Resource 