Electric Village

New York, the city that never sleeps, a relentless flow of information, bureaucratic, traversed by human knowledge, a crossroads of capital and the metaphysics of distant cultures and new technologies. This is how it must have appeared to those who traveled from the far East to live there.

But the shock worked both ways: while chaos can trigger physical discomfort, slow living in contact with nature generates a state of psychophysical wellbeing. This is what happened to those who ventured to India in the 1960s in search of their inner self. For many it was a temporary escape, a pause before lacing up their Converse and returning to the city. For others it was an epiphany.

Bill Buchen was one of them. He stayed. He kept going back. As he put it: "My music connections in New York are mostly a couple older Jazz players who did Broadway and a lot of touring. My biggest connection is with the Indian music community. I spent two years in India, speak Hindi and played about 200 Indian weddings." Like many of the musicians we have presented to you, he changed his life. He devoted himself to art, and together with his wife invented the modern playground structures we now find all over the world.

But before all that, he left us something dark and precious, built on relentless rhythmic patterns and sensory elevations carried by the flute of the remarkably versatile Jose James.

A dichotomy of two worlds, clearly expressed on two sides of the vinyl, Electric Village is pulsating energy on the A side, releasing into a cathartic latin driven jazz dance on the B side.