Salenta + Topu - Moon Set, Moon Rise

Yep, you got it: Much Needed Repress. And undoubtedly one of the year's best. Moon Set, Moon Rise, a jazz-oriented compositional suite from New York duo Salenta Baisden and Topu Lyo, feels beamed in from another time. As it was recorded in parts between 2018 and 2020 and then first issued as a self-released cassette in 2021 before making its way to the increasingly essential Futura Resistenza for this vinyl pressing, i suppose you could argue it was. I'll admit that 2018 does feel very different to 2023. But i also mean a different era entirely. Essentially a series of threaded together live recordings free of almost all post-production and editing, this is intimate music making in service of understanding and shared emotional intuition, yet one so elegant in formation it could be cast in marble. Just piano and cello, there's a profound contrast between the minimalist components and the resulting emotional breadth, this sense of if not the eternal, then a truth, the same feeling you might get from, say, Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru or Dominique Lawalree. But of course the difference here is this is music in collaboration not isolation, which requires a different approach and mindset, where one must respond unspokenly with the other. The unstudied nature of Moon Set, Moon Rise says something of the utopian possibilities of communication, that forever ongoing battle of humanity we can never seem to get right. Salenta and Topu have struck on something unique here, if not timeless, then instead with all the time in the world, and with their effortless dialogue, expressive of the kind of hopefulness that we might want to see stick around forever.