Master Margherita - Hippies With Gadgets

STYLE

Electro-acoustic global chillout. Hippies with gadgets is a genre mixing downtempo album apparently completely unfettered by convention, there is a sense of 'anything goes' here reminiscent of some of the more exploratory music of the early seventies. There are dub-reggae beats with electric organ, Indian tablas with bird song and liquid fx, meandering flute leads and slide guitar, deep beatless ambient electronics, forest atmospheres with digital soundscaping. Electric and bass guitars and imaginative programming flesh out most of the tracks balancing the 'live' performance elements with the artificial. Rhythmically, the first two thirds of the album frequently take a live drum approach to the percussion, very laid back and restful - that said the beats at times shift into more overtly digitally driven grooves. As the album moves closer to the end, the beats are allowed to slip away, the dreamy feeling that has been present in greater or lesser degree throughout, now welling up and infusing everything with

ARTWORK

Hippies With Gadgets is one of those albums brave enough to appear with no words at all on the front over - the insert opening out into a text free two panel montage. The imagery is as rich and eclectic as the music - a graphic elfin profile with a peculiar gadget between its lips leans into the frame from the right - an esoteric mandala-like design seems to act as a hub for a current of purple discs - the backdrop deftly blends woodland photography and drawn elements - everything but for a couple of focal points in hues of lilac, purple and indigo. The rear cover holds a simple tracklist of titles only - the details are within the two panel insert, here full credits appear for each track as well as the respective bpms.

OVERALL

Hippies With Gadgets is the new album from Swiss bassist Master Margherita (Moreno Antognini) and follow-up to the 2007 release Mastura. Master Margherita is well known to downtempo fans for his work as manager at Peak Records and membership of the Peaking Goddess Collective. The label well describes the new music as having a “free-thinking” composition style; what else would you expect from an artist whose musical interests and experiences are so diverse: from reggae to ambient through world beat and psychedelia. But don't get the idea that this is a disjointed slapping together of musical collage items, no; Hippies With Gadgets is well structured and strongly coherent. The eleven tracks flow together in colourful, chilled unity. If you'd like to listen to the album - there are some samples at the Arabesque website.