| Universalists | ||||
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| Studio album by | ||||
| Released | 2018 | |||
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| Length | 33:07 | |||
| Label | Joyful Noise Recordings | |||
| Producer | ||||
| Yonatan Gat chronology | ||||
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Universalists is the second full-length studio album by Yonatan Gat released in 2018 on Joyful Noise Recordings. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] Gal Lazer plays drums, and Sergio Sayeg is on bass. The album was produced by David Berman of the Silver Jews and by Gat himself. Other personnel involved with the album's production included Kevin McMahon, Calvin Johnson (Beat Happening), Thor Harris (Swans) and many others. [7] Several of the tracks sample Alan Lomax's European field recording from the 1950s. [3]
Yonatan Gat is an experimental guitarist, composer and bandleader based in New York. His cross-genre sound was called "a vital new music form" by Magnet Magazine, "melding improvisation, world music, punk and avant garde."
Joyful Noise Recordings is an independent record label from Indianapolis, Indiana. The label was founded in 2003 in Bloomington, Indiana by Karl Hofstetter, who also played drums on many of the label's first releases. Joyful Noise currently has a roster of 20+ bands of various musical styles, though according to the label, each artist "in one way or another bridges this gap between pop and noise." Along with housing offices and the warehouse of the label, their Fountain Square location hosts live shows and a small record store.
David Cloud Berman is an American poet, cartoonist and singer-songwriter best known for his work with indie-rock band the Silver Jews. Although the band primarily existed as a recording project for most of its existence, the Silver Jews toured regularly from 2005 until 2009. In January 2009, Berman announced his retirement from music in hopes of finding a meaningful way of undoing the damage that his estranged father Richard had brought upon society.
The album is noted for its advanced editing techniques and global musical perspective, with Spin describing it as: "an ambitious, sprawling record, a catalog of fever dreams, where styles and sounds dovetail in transparent sheafs of blotter paper...nothing is off-limits when the universe is the limit." [3]
Spin is an American music magazine founded in 1985 by publisher Bob Guccione, Jr. The magazine stopped running in print in 2012 and currently runs as a webzine, owned by the Billboard-Hollywood Reporter Media Group division of Valence Media.
The album takes its cues from the editing techniques of Teo Macero (Miles Davis' producer). Kanye West's style of editing and sampling on Yeezus and the Life of Pablo were also particularly influential to Gat's approach on Universalists.
Attilio Joseph "Teo" Macero was an American jazz saxophonist, composer, and record producer. He was a producer at Columbia Records for twenty years. Macero produced Miles Davis' Bitches Brew, and Dave Brubeck's Time Out, which are two of the best-selling and most influential jazz albums of all time. Although the extent of his role has been disputed, he also has been associated with the production of Davis' 1959 album Kind of Blue, jazz's best-selling record.
Miles Dewey Davis III was an American jazz trumpeter, bandleader, and composer. He is among the most influential and acclaimed figures in the history of jazz and 20th century music. Davis adopted a variety of musical directions in a five-decade career that kept him at the forefront of many major stylistic developments in jazz.
Kanye Omari West is an American rapper, singer, songwriter, record producer, entrepreneur, and fashion designer. Over the course of his career, West has been an instigator of various developments within mainstream hip hop and popular music at large. His musical career has drawn on varied influences including soul, R&B, electro, indie rock, synth-pop, and industrial music, in addition to influences from other art mediums including visual art and architecture.
The music video for "Medicine" was inspired by the visual style of Jean Rouche, a French Documentary Film-Maker. [8]
Jean Rouch was a French filmmaker and anthropologist.
At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications, Universalists received an average score of 81, based on 6 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim".
Metacritic is a website that aggregates reviews of media products: films, TV shows, music albums, video games, and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged. Metacritic was created by Jason Dietz, Marc Doyle, and Julie Doyle Roberts in 1999. The site provides an excerpt from each review and hyperlinks to its source. A color of green, yellow or red summarizes the critics' recommendations. It has been described as the video game industry's "premier" review aggregator.
