Koushik – Out My Window

Koushik Ghosh grew up in Dundas Canada, his mother and brother were and are very musical, the former sings and has released many albums of Indian music, the latter runs a Techno label. At an impressionable age he fell for shoegaze bands both mainstream and obscure (from My Bloody Valentine to Adorable) and around the same time got into beat making through his brother’s influence. A bit later he became friends with fellow Ontarian Dan Snaith (Manitoba, Caribou) and Londoner Kieran Hebden (Four Tet), he guested on Manitoba’s Up In Flames, was asked to re-mix a track from labelmates MF Doom and Madlib’s Madvilliany, and his debut album Out My Window was produced by Peanut Butter Wolf, who’s Stones Throw is the label on which the album has been released, and to which he is signed. This intriguing mix of experiences and interests has been concentrated and filtered into 16 tracks that are like a padded explosion of sound.He achieves this through laying down a hazy mix of pretty instruments that melt together in a relaxed, vaguely positive, goo. Vibraphone, flute, violin, harp, acoustic guitar, bass, organs, keyboards and more swirl around, with pedals and effects twisting and tweaking the instruments ‘til they melt into each other. Having said that, Koushik’s beatmaking is perhaps one of the strongest presences on Out My Window, slabs of funky breaks are flung down on top of the goo, sometimes at odds with whatever else is happening, the sound levels for those hazy instruments seem to be at a much lower level and because they congeal together they can sit quite apart from the loud percussion.Panda Bear/Miracle Fortress Beach Boy borrowing occurs on ‘Lying In The Sun’, his clearest vocal of the album pushes through, and even then only ‘Suuuuunshine’ can clearly be heard, which is quite apt. Twanging swirling stringed instruments loop the simple half-melody over and over whilst funky subtleties caress around the edges through bass, guitar and drums. There are various re-creations of this on most of the albums tracks, but perhaps never as explicitly or solidly as on ‘Lying In The Sun’. The other most dominant element of the album is the lounge jazz feel to the structure of songs, ‘Coolin’’, for instance, has that cool late-night noodling feel, almost verging on elevator music, it’s an obvious choice of theme in some respects, the occasionally soaring hazy summertime melodies have a distinct kinship with the lazy late night grooves.The stronger song based tracks benefit from a more (relatively) focused approach than the rest of the album, not content to drift, some tracks stand out from the rest, like ‘Ifoundu’, an orchestral and sentimental segment, ‘Bright And Shining’, which brings a percussive cowbell booty shake, the melody not unlike something from a Prefuse 73 track, ‘Buttaflybeat’ a club tune, stripped down and seen through a foggy lens, and the title track, which plays with soft tension and all the typical instruments sounding vaguely off-key and psychedelic.The tracks that are content to drift ultimately hinders the album, short instrumentals like ‘Welcome’, ‘Outerlude’ and ‘Forest Loop’ work quite well, offering up interesting experiments and jewels of aural exploration, but songs like ‘See You’ and ‘In A Green Space’ ”“ although interesting in their own ways ”“ end up sounding indistinct, a by-product of the swampily integrated instruments and jarring percussion. 70% Koushik on Myspace