Bahía Mansa - Mallki

Released: November 3

Sweet, serene, and deeply introspective; Mallki features seven tracks dedicated to the mythology and archetypes of trees, namely the concept of the tree of life. The album stretches far into the reaches of ambient music and utilizes a number of intriguing sounds and textures. Mansa has always had this tendency throughout his work to bring in gentle yet seemingly randomized melodic textures. These textures play well atop the supple drone-like pads that form the base of his compositions and this newest album builds on this long-standing motif in a way that brings an ambiguously spiritual quality to the runtime as a whole. 

The album starts us off much deeper into the ambient territory as lush pads and clicky field recordings bear most of the weight in the first track, "Senderos." But it is not long until these elegantly indiscriminate melodies appear gently in the second track "Caminates." Gentle tones ping around in the sound field with a seemingly carefree yet purposeful pattern to it, almost as if it is trying to state that its random-seeming nature is not without reason or rhyme.  "Pardes" is a track that follows a bit in these footsteps except that the melody competes with the swelling of the pads to a degree that seems to illustrate a balance that is less static than it is very back-and-forth, ever changing. In my opinion, this seems to be what the album as a whole wants to convey: that there is some balance of forces within nature, one that is incomprehensible to the individual and foggy at best to the whole of humankind.