Maya Jane Coles Is Back With A New EP

She always impress but this 5 track EP elevates her to another level…

What do you get when you combine ambient, experimental, minimal house, with elements of dub and trip-hop - all executed with the technical finesse of an audio engineering wizard? You get Maya Jane Coles and a goddamn aurally transcending experience; that’s what. 

She’s gone and done that thing she always does where she releases a new project with an excellent level of insouciance - under her label I/AM/ME, because why not add label owner extraordinaire to her title - and it’s so. Bloody. Good.

The project as a whole sounds like the hurricane lovechild of Massive Attack and Portishead, injected with a little deep house sensibility, and of course harnessing the signature Maya Jane Coles magic touch. The opening track ‘Don’t Leave’ intersperse a nostalgic reverb-y guitar with a vocal sample reminiscent of the 90s acid house movement, and with ‘Isolate’ moves into a 70BPM lounge-y experimental sub heavy dub track in the form of ‘Isolate’. 

Songs ‘Other Side’ and ‘Visionary’ pose the same stark contrast, while somehow managing to sound consistent, but it’s the last track of the EP that takes the cake for me: ‘Waves and Whirlwinds’ is a huge sigh of infatuation. The soft, distorted vocal sample feels a little like your first true love, while the arpeggiated melodic synthesizer flips that around to come off like your first true heartbreak. The song overall moves through so many emotions it may just make you shed a tear or two but in a totally cool and not at all lame way.  This project overall is a bloody good assertion of Maya’s talent and her dominance within the industry.

Words by Marli Grosskopf