''Excelsior'' is the second studio album by American musician Jasper Marsalis, and his first under the alias Slauson Malone 1. The album was released on October 6, 2023, by

Warp Records Warp Records is a British independent record label that specialises in Electronic music, electronic, indie rock and experimental music. It was founded in Sheffield in 1989 by Steve Beckett, Robert Mitchell and Robert Gordon. It has released recor ...

, Marsalis' first release with the label.

Background and release

On August 15, 2023,

announced that they had signed Marsalis, and released his debut single with the label, "Voyager". "Voyager" came with a music video directed by Ryosuke Tanzawa. The song was described as sounding "like the familiar aesthetics of

hip-hop Hip-hop or hip hop (originally disco rap) is a popular music genre that emerged in the early 1970s from the African-American community of New York City. The style is characterized by its synthesis of a wide range of musical techniques. Hi ...

and

soul The soul is the purported Mind–body dualism, immaterial aspect or essence of a Outline of life forms, living being. It is typically believed to be Immortality, immortal and to exist apart from the material world. The three main theories that ...

fed into a

wormhole A wormhole is a hypothetical structure that connects disparate points in spacetime. It can be visualized as a tunnel with two ends at separate points in spacetime (i.e., different locations, different points in time, or both). Wormholes are base ...

and pulled out the other end, indelibly stretched and scarred by the ordeal." On September 5, Marsalis announced the album, set for an October 6 release by Warp, and released the album's second single, "New Joy", with a music video codirected by himself and Injury Reserve and By Storm's Parker Corey. On October 3, Marsalis released the third single, "Half-Life", with a lyric video. The album is Marsalis' first under the alias Slauson Malone 1, having previously released ''A Quiet Farwell, 2016–2018'' as just Slauson Malone. The song "Undercommons" is named after an essay collection by the Black cultural theorists Fred Moten and Stefano Harney.

Style

The album includes a long list of genres, including

no wave No wave was an avant-garde music genre and visual art scene that emerged in the late 1970s in Downtown New York City. The term was a pun based on the rejection of commercial new wave music. Reacting against punk rock's recycling of rock and r ...

free jazz Free jazz, or free form in the early to mid-1970s, is a style of avant-garde jazz or an experimental approach to jazz improvisation that developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when musicians attempted to change or break down jazz conventi ...

chamber music Chamber music is a form of classical music that is composed for a small group of Musical instrument, instruments—traditionally a group that could fit in a Great chamber, palace chamber or a large room. Most broadly, it includes any art music ...

, modern classical,

psychedelic rock Psychedelic rock is a rock music Music genre, genre that is inspired, influenced, or representative of psychedelia, psychedelic culture, which is centered on perception-altering hallucinogenic drugs. The music incorporated new electronic sound ...

bedroom pop Lo-fi (also typeset as lofi or low-fi; short for low fidelity) is a music or music production, production quality in which elements usually regarded as imperfections in the context of a recording or performance are present, sometimes as a delibe ...

noise rock Noise rock (sometimes called noise punk) is a noise music, noise-oriented style of experimental rock that spun off from punk rock in the 1980s. Drawing on movements such as minimal music, minimalism, industrial music, and New York hardcore, a ...

reggae Reggae () is a music genre that originated in Jamaica during the late 1960s. The term also denotes the modern popular music of Jamaica and its Jamaican diaspora, diaspora. A 1968 single by Toots and the Maytals, "Do the Reggay", was the first ...

indie folk Indie folk (also called alternative folk) is an alternative genre of music that arose in the 1990s among musicians from indie rock scenes influenced by folk music. Characteristics The staff of '' Paste Magazine'' said in 2020: "No music genre ...

, lo-fi hip hop,

surf-pop Surf music (also known as surf rock, surf pop, or surf guitar) is a genre of rock music associated with surf culture, particularly as found in Southern California. It was especially popular from 1958 to 1964 in two major forms. The first is inst ...

indie pop Indie pop (also typeset as indie-pop or indiepop) is a music genre and subculture that combines guitar pop with a DIY ethic in opposition to the style and tone of mainstream pop music. It originated from British post-punk in the late 1970s and s ...

avant rock Experimental rock, also called avant-rock, is a subgenre of rock music that pushes the boundaries of common composition and performance technique or which experiments with the basic elements of the genre. Artists aim to liberate and innovate, wit ...

, dub, and

baroque pop Baroque pop (sometimes called baroque rock) is a fusion genre that combines rock music with particular elements of classical music. It emerged in the mid-1960s as artists pursued a majestic, orchestral sound and is identifiable for its appropria ...

. ''

Bandcamp Daily Bandcamp is an American online music distribution platform founded in 2008 by Oddpost co-founder Ethan Diamond and programmers Shawn Grunberger, Joe Holt and Neal Tucker, with an office and record store in Oakland, California. Acquired by Epi ...

''s Stephanie Barclay described the genre span as a "shapeshifting restlessness" where "you never know what you'll get next". Marsalis sings and plays several instruments on the album, including guitar,

theremin The theremin (; originally known as the ætherphone, etherphone, thereminophone or termenvox/thereminvox) is an electronic musical instrument controlled without physical contact by the performer (who is known as a thereminist). It is named aft ...

Mellotron The Mellotron is an electro-mechanical musical instrument developed in Birmingham, England, in 1963. It is played by pressing its keys, each of which causes a length of magnetic tape to contact a Capstan (tape recorder), capstan, which pulls i ...

, and

Wurlitzer The Rudolph Wurlitzer Company, usually referred to as simply Wurlitzer, is an American company started in Cincinnati in 1853 by German immigrant (Franz) Rudolph Wurlitzer. The company initially imported stringed, woodwind and brass instruments ...

, while Nicky Wetherell provides cello. Other instruments include

tape loop In music, tape loops are loops of magnetic tape used to create repetitive, rhythmic musical patterns or dense layers of sound when played on a tape recorder. Originating in the 1940s with the work of Pierre Schaeffer, they were used among ...

harpsichord A harpsichord is a musical instrument played by means of a musical keyboard, keyboard. Depressing a key raises its back end within the instrument, which in turn raises a mechanism with a small plectrum made from quill or plastic that plucks one ...

, bass, drums,

electronics Electronics is a scientific and engineering discipline that studies and applies the principles of physics to design, create, and operate devices that manipulate electrons and other Electric charge, electrically charged particles. It is a subfield ...

, strings, and

synthesizer A synthesizer (also synthesiser or synth) is an electronic musical instrument that generates audio signals. Synthesizers typically create sounds by generating waveforms through methods including subtractive synthesis, additive synthesis a ...

Reception

The Quietus ''The Quietus'' is a British online music and pop culture magazine founded by John Doran and Luke Turner. The site is an editorially independent publication led by Doran with a group of freelance journalists and critics. Content ''The Quietu ...

'' Arusa Qureshi called the album "a fascinating and hypnotic listen."

AllMusic AllMusic (previously known as All-Music Guide and AMG) is an American online database, online music database. It catalogs more than three million album entries and 30 million tracks, as well as information on Musical artist, musicians and Mus ...

's Paul Simpson called the album "another vulnerable expression of raw truth that takes dozens of listens to begin to decipher, but it's entirely worth the effort." Barclay wrote that Marsalis' "restless searching" on the album "doesn't get exhausting", and that "it's easy enough to press play on this album and find yourself along for the ride, wherever it's going."

Year-end lists

Track listing

Personnel

* Jasper Marsalis –

mixing engineer A mixing engineer (or simply mix engineer) is responsible for combining ("mixing") different sonic elements of an auditory piece into a complete rendition (also known as "final mix" or "mixdown"), whether in music, film, or any other content of a ...

, recording engineer (1–11, 14–16, 18) * Andrew Lappin – recording engineer (2, 3, 5, 8–17)

References

{{Reflist 2023 albums Slauson Malone 1 albums Warp Records albums