Beck Steinar

The sound of the horn epitomized stormy emotions for composers of Romantic music. Robert Schumann is said to have spoken of the horn as being the orchestra's soul. For poets, the horn's sound was a symbol of the soul's longing. For horn players, however, what was at stake for much of the Romantic period was the soul of the horn itself, for it was an instrument that faced experiment and change occasioned by new technology, notably the invention of the valve. This recording explores and illustrates this important era in the evolution of the horn.

NOT TiGHT is the long-awaited debut album from virtuosic Gen Z duo, DOMi and JD Beck, released on Anderson .Paak’s new label Apeshit in partnership with the legendary jazz label Blue Note Records. It features the likes of Thundercat, whose deadpan funk is their closest antecedent, Herbie Hancock, Snoop Dogg, Busta Rhymes, Mac DeMarco, Kurt Rosenwinkel, and .Paak himself. Their music finds both humour and greatness in harmonic complexity and rhythmic shiftiness, abruptly adopting and ditching tempos, toying with time signatures, and sneaking extra beats into bridges. They offer winking breaks and gleeful pivots, but the album is more composed than anything they’ve done before, toying with pop structures and pretty restraint. That befits their origin story. The duo first played together in a room full of blaring demos at a trade show, but they bonded over gauche keyboard FX and mom jokes. Over the next year and a half, they wrote and recorded much of the album at JD’s house in Dallas on drums and a 49-key MIDI board with just a few mics. Along the way, DOMi and JD Beck have sat in with Herbie Hancock and backed Thundercat, Ariana Grande, Eric André, and more; they also co-wrote “Skate” on .Paak’s Grammy-winning album with Bruno Mars as Silk Sonic.