Entry 1586 - Kalaido - Moonlit Tales

Style: lo-fi hip hop

Thoughts: I have been looking for this album for what seems like an age. I have ordered it on three separate occasions, each time it gets cancelled or delayed or lost in the mail. I never thought I would get this record into my collection, but strange things occur from time to time and one day it randomly showed up on my doorstep... no explanation, no return address, just a package with a record in it. 

I have a strained relationship with low fidelity hip hop. The music and I used to have a very close relationship when I first found it, but over time I found that many of the artists were merely writing the same songs over and over. It's like the whole scene was obsessed with creating the same song over and over again, and it eventually made me drop out of actively looking for the music. 

Of course there are stand outs, and the ones that do truly create exceptional music. Kalaido is one such artist. I think this comes from a fundamental difference in the way that they make their music compared to most of the scene.  

Rather than rely on sampling the works of other artists through plunderphonics, Kalaido is content to make their own music. This music is then woven together into a similar style to lo-fi hip hop... but it comes from a fundamentally different source: originality. The guitars are played and recorded, much of the instruments are also recorded. Other parts of the album are indeed sampled but in a way that it compliments the live instruments rather than the main focus of the music. 

This approach gives the music life that is so uncommon in the genre. Instead of falling asleep to hearing the same nearly AI generated song for the fifteenth time, Moonlit Tales has twists and turns in directions that I would not have expected based on the tropes of the genre. A jazz piano interlude here, or a clarinet there. Hell even a violin from time to time... all spice up the music to a degree that is gloriously uncommon.

Kalaido's Moonlit Tales is likely one of the better lofi albums in my collection. Of course there is better music in the genre, but as it stands this album is among the better entries thereof.