Noah Slee

♜ Noah Slee
präsentiert von WDR Cosmo, HUSH HUSH & JUICE Magazin

► 22.10. || 19h || YUCA, Köln
► Born in New Zealand, based in Berlin – Soul genius Noah Slee live in Cologne

Tickets gibt’s ab Freitag, dem 01.06., an allen bekannten VVK-Stellen, wie z.B. KölnTicket.

The voice of Noah Slee drifts from totemic soul to the unfolding limits of pop, slung mist-like between eruptions of digital rhythm. It’s a voice that slips between three continents, that can knot into pure percussion and uncoil into a thread of falsetto in the space of a verse.

And a voice that has enraptured European festivals and tastemakers as varied as Boiler Room, Indie Shuffle and Okayplayer. “What we were writing was a mixtape so it gave us no boundaries” Slee murmurs, citing the only fundamental guiding principal used in the making of Otherland, his first full-length release to be released by Wondercore Island and Majestic Casual in mid 2017.

For Noah Slee, the future has been a long time coming. Growing up in a Tongan household in West Auckland, New Zealand, he listened to African reggae through a wood laminate stereo and woke to the clamour of Earth Wind and Fire. Everything is gathered, disembodied, and reimagined, nothing from his past seems entirely discarded.

Even his frustration at studio recording in Brisbane obliquely clings to him years later—repelling him into the world of sampling and home recording, and leading him inexorably to Berlin and into the company of producer Ben Esser.

Slee and Esser’s relationship is one that is somewhat mimetic of Otherland itself—simultaneously instinctual and suffused with personal history.
“We did the whole listening to music thing, listening to all kinds of stuff from when I was young and when he was young” Slee smiles. Otherland’s sampling acts as a kind of cipher for understanding how they seem to work in both the past and the momentary. Sergio Mendez can be heard layered with other vintage samba beats. While on another track (the much-lauded ‘DGAF’) Shiloh Dynasty’s voice is harvested from an instagram post, re-pitched, and a song scaffolded around it.

Part of Otherland’s diffuse range can be laid at the feet of Noah Slee’s own restless geography—but only a part. The spectrum the mixtape occupies is borne of thresholds more adverse than landscape. It wrestles with place as something internal and unstable, something that contains within it refractory notions of heritage, identity, sexuality and grief.
“A big part of being in Berlin was coming into myself” Slee admits quietly.

And part of Otherland’s joyous, cathartic appeal is clear in its musical guests—predominantly songwriters rather than performers and people, Slee enthuses, “who were really into the record.” But despite “not being fazed with names” guests include such luminaries as Simon Mavin and Paul Bender from Haitus Kaiyote, seminal future-soul artist Georgia Anne Mudrow, Shiloh Dynasty, Auckland-based MC Melodownz and Brisbane multi-instrumentalist Jordan Rakei.

Otherland spans genres; it undulates between the bygone and the brand new. It’s confounded and irrepressibly catchy. Noah Slee puts it best: “It’s a truthful representation of where I’m at”