RM056
Little Funky Son, the new album from multidisciplinary musician Ujstin Echno, mosaics together the artist's life experiences across countries, years, genres, and friendships. Born in Nagyvárad, Romania, raised in Ferguson, Missouri, and now residing in Los Angeles, Echno's body of work is the final result of a series of catalysts – the desire to spotlight Eastern European musicians through their years-long Radio Benska show, their day job as a post-production sound editor in film, adolescent hours spent driving around St. Louis listening to R&B radio, and all of the ephemera in between.
The music was born out of time spent living, working, and traveling in Chicago, St. Louis, Prague, Milan, and Romania between 2018 and 2021 – often not through, perhaps, more common methods of artistic practice, but rather the serendipities arising from the interim moments. Take the wispy, mordant chugger "ISAACDNB," which started out as a request from a philosophy professor Echno worked with in St. Louis. It exists because, in its original form, it was a backing track for an educational video on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason Echno put together for his class. Another centerpiece of Little Funky Son, "WORDOFHONOR," was taken from recording sessions for Echno's collaborative 2022 album (as EKSE) with ELAZY, BINEAL PONK. The song samples streetcars in the Milan public transit system, pairing them with a Beach House-esque melodic line for a woozy, slightly dissonant lullaby.
The sonic frameworks engendered on Little Funky Son are deeply molded by two unexpected technologies. Echno's use of the Boss PS-3 pedal and the dialogue editing software iZotope RX beget a unique audio quality – highly dynamic, weighty but shifting in space. It's not hi-fi or lo-fi but an unknown third thing, like you came across it in an attic. Because of the slippery modalities in play, this album feels at once cryptic and vulnerable, a rippling portal into someone else's inner world. Echno tells a story about their father returning to Romania on a trip and showing their music to his friend, who in turn described its genre as personal music.
"He's right," Echno reflects. "[This music] is all over the place, but it's tied to particular people and places, and that is a genre. It doesn't adhere to any kind of external expectations." The sonic non-linearity and frank personalness of the record draw from Echno's experiences as a longtime freeform radio DJ at WNUR, Terry Radio, Ma3azef, and KCHUNG, as well as their musical family – their father played guitar, wrote songs, and befriended The Grifters while coming of age in the South in the '80s and '90s, and their mother and her siblings anachronistically collected whatever Western pop records they could get ahold of in Nagyvárad prior to the dissolution of the USSR.
Recursive and refractive, Little Funky Son takes Echno's secret experiences and filters them through each other. The image of the rippling portal again comes to mind – personal music applies to the way you peer in too, and are thus actively interpolated into this process. Here, then, Echno's funky-sounding ephemera from the in-between become a communal meeting place for artist and listener.
All music by Justin Enoch
except flute on track 8 by Riona Oshima-Ryan
Executive Produced by Zurkas Tepla
Mastered by Alexandr Pustynsky
Words by Nina Posner
![Ujstin Echno - Little Funky Son [Reserve Matinee, 2024]](https://nina.imgix.net/https%3A%2F%2Fgateway.irys.xyz%2FDNLeQF85U88Ic-EMz9Vv-I_qJQJj4cf1XqvI7OPmwvU?ixlib=js-3.8.0&w=1080&fm=webp&s=2986e2e65479329f449f31e4414e04c3)
