Colombian musician Jan Esbra debuts on Phantom Limb’s Spirituals imprint with dulcet new album Suspended In A Breath, a psychedelic, meditative, and many-layered exploration of solo guitar, Organelle, and loop pedals, all rendered unrecognisable by masterly effects processing.
“At the beginning of 2023, I was in a moment of intensive reflection and I had begun to learn about tarot,” Jan Esbra writes. “I decided to make ambient music every day. During this learning process, and the necessary introspection it generated, I found an emotional outlet. This music reflects some of the intensity of that period and its accompanying emotional textures. It was imprinted with an emotional fingerprint of sorts, and a lot of those sounds felt very relevant to the shifting and growing I underwent.”
Esbra’s new record Suspended In A Breath - a collection of material recorded during this daily composition practice - is instantly enrapturing. Written for solo guitar, drum machine, and Organelle (modified, processed, and looped through an extensive and enviable array of gear), the timbres are widely varied and deeply sonically affecting, rendering the root instrumentation barely discernible throughout, only clearly apparent in moments. Flashes of inspiration from material such as Raymond Scott’s early electronic explorations, the jazz-leaning electronic production of Floating Points, or Manuel Göttsching’s landmark E2-E4 are absorbed into a colourful palette enmeshed with the influence of Esbra’s coastal Colombian heritage, as subtle ritmos Cartageneros play out in mesmerising and playful patterns of brightly melodic loops. Esbra also references his friend, the NYC songwriter and Berklee music graduate Takuma Matsui, whose guidance during the pair’s regular improvised jam sessions opened for Esbra a portal into more discordant and abrasive soundworlds than his usual destinations. The music of Suspended In A Breath smartly tempers these elements against its freeflowing prettiness, ensuring it does not slip away in the stream.
