You have to pay close attention to Misha Panfilov‘s albums not to miss the associative twists in his music. Take »Vertical«, the first track on »Atlântico«, the new album from the Estonian composer and multi-instrumentalist. The track begins airily, like a free jazz improvisation, before the horns take over with a jazz-funk groove and a Spacemen-3-inspired passage leads to a psychedelic jam session that eventually gets lost in guitar feedback and noise. And that was just the first track on an album from a musician who not only ignores apparent stylistic boundaries, but creates something new and amazing out of them. There is space-age exotica like Esquivel, with wordless ba-ba-ba vocals and a Balearic vibe, and a track that treads a fine line between ambient and new age. The fact that this album doesn’t simply implode in the face of its musical impossibilities is down to Misha Panfilov. He takes the grey area, or rather the colourful area, between spiritual jazz and easy listening as the basis for his compositions, from which he sets off in all directions.
Atlantico
