Wayne Snow - Red runner EP

Through ties with the likes of Glenn Astro, Muff Deep, Brandt Brauer Frick and CTEPEO ´57, Copenhagen’s Tartelet Records have become a coterie for an auspicious breed of modern-day oddball. Opting for analogue gear, the Tartelet mainstays bring together lopsided sampling and loose-limbed rhythms suffused with a distinctive degree of resistless energy.

Shapeshifting with each record, the releases continue to roll behind the success of Max Graef’s ‘Rivers Of The Red Planet’ LP. The next instalment comes courtesy of a previous collaborator with Max - Nigerian born vocalist and songwriter Kesiana a.k.a Wayne Snow. Now a resident of Berlin and with music as his liberator - Snow stands at a comfortable vantage point where escape from a tough past is visible.

Now in full flow - his first EP ‘Red Runner’ sees Snow drop a deluge of soul over grubby Rhodes tones, contorted melodies and tumbling drums backed up by remixes from Glenn Astro and Delusions of Grandeur regulars Session Victim.

The title track rubs Snow’s harmonised vocal lines against choked horn stabs and chugging guitar flashes while Glenn Astro & Imyrmind inject some mangled synthesis and Session Victim pack in a rhythmically tight revision that remains pinned under a persistent 4/4 throughout. Blue Moon brings things to a close as it softly gallops like a Dilla record making use of stuttered shuffles and granular drum samples.

The first of it’s kind - ‘Red Runner’ is a collaborative project between Tartelet and Comet Records. Based in Paris, Comet specialises in bringing a myriad of Afro Psych Rock sounds together and are lauded champions of the Afrobeat revival through close affiliation with such luminaries as drummer Tony Allen. A positive step for both camps - Wayne Snow’s EP is the inaugural step for a promising artist and an enlivening insight into things to come from both Comet and Tartelet.