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Travis Stewart’s journey to making 3FOR82 began, fittingly, on 3/4. For his 41st birthday, on March 4th last year, he ventured out to Joshua Tree National Park, California, to seek clarity and inspiration for what became his 11th studio album as Machinedrum; 12 high-intensity, ruminative tracks that thread the needle between his past, present and future selves.
3FOR82 builds on the vocalist-centric, genre-blending songwriting of the last Machinedrum album, 2020’s A View Of U, and the thematic groundwork laid down on 2023 EP 4#TRAX (dedicated to channel trax on IRC, a ‘90s chat platform). Between drum & bass, hip-hop, jazz, R&B and juke, dazzling beat switches and a singular ear for sonics, Stewart weaves in a crew of collaborators. Jesse Boykins III, the album’s co-executive producer and a close friend of Stewart, leads with various contributions; while a ritzy cast including Tinashe, KUČKA, Duckwrth, AKTHESAVIOR, Mick Jenkins, Ezri, Tanerélle, Deniro Farrar, Topaz Jones, deem spencer, aja monet, ROZET, Will Johnson and Ian Maciak rounds the record off.
This rich, prismatic approach to collaboration builds on the uptempo vocal manipulations that won Stewart acclaim in electronic communities, notably on 2011’s breakout LP Room(s) and 2013 opus Vapor City. 3FOR82’s lead single ‘ZOOM’, featuring Tinashe, kicks off the campaign on March 4th; the album is due for release on May 24th, through Ninja Tune, accompanied by a boutique printed zine, co-designed with visual artist and LuckyMe affiliate Joseph Durnan [124 World]. Given that Ninja Tune was one of young Travis’ favourite labels, this speaks to a mantra guiding the record: observing nostalgia through a contemporary lens.
In the quiet vastness of Joshua Tree, Machinedrum combed through old harddrives full of his late-’90s beats: many of them were made on Impulse Tracker, a rough freeware programme that lay untouched for the better part of a quarter-century. “That’s really where I cut my teeth in electronic music-making,” he remembers. Although he’s been a committed Ableton Live user for years, “there’s been a yearning for me to tap back into that older self; the software is super limiting, and there’s a unique creativity that comes out of limitations.”
After finding a DOS emulator that would run Impulse Tracker, he recorded himself playing and riffing off these beats to build 3FOR82; sample by sample, he made original sound banks that could be fed into a dedicated library, giving 3FOR82 a distinct tone. “From there, there was no going back,” Stewart smiles. “It bridged the gap between my past and future self”. This period included recording himself and his environment with a VHS camera, then running the footage audio into the tracker, creating a meta-library of sounds.
With decades’ of work under his belt, across various guises — including Machinedrum, ambient project Tstewart, indispensable club rocket J-E-T-S with Jimmy Edgar and Sepalcure with Praveen Sharma — a collaborative outlook and practice is what charges Stewart.
©
2024
Holocene
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