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Before he was old enough to attend clubs as a punter, Detroitâs Jimmy Edgar was cupping headphones to his ears behind the decks, DJing shoulder to shoulder with hometown heroes like Juan Atkins. In the 17 years since he signed to Warp as a teenager, his style has grown alongside his voracious tastes, encompassing IDM, mutated synth funk, and, most recently, hip-hop. Edgar channels that lifetime of songwriting and sound manipulation into his fourth album,
Cheetah Bend. The veteran electronic producerâs take on the genre-clashing freneticism of hyperpop, it doubles as a celebration of SOPHIE, his late friend and collaborator, to whom the album is dedicated and whose influence abounds.
Detroit producer Jimmy Edgar has been a versatile and dependable voice in electronic music for years. He’s capable of adapting to and embracing new sounds with the kind of energy and enthusiasm that’s rare for a chameleon producer of his calibre. From the glitchy dance jams of
Colour Strip through to J-E-T-S, his blissed-out take on R&B with Machinedrum, Edgar has never sounded jaded.
Cheetah Bend is his first solo album in nearly nine years. His childlike sense of fun bleeds through every moment.
Cheetah Bend might be a solo album, but it’s not a lone venture. Edgar enlists likeminded eccentrics and personal heroes like Danny Brown, the late, great SOPHIE, and Hudson Mohawke to add their magnetism to what is largely a celebratory party record. These are brash club bangers shifted into cartoony forms.
“What do they want us to know about space and spaceships?” pondered Jimmy Edgar on Twitter just as 2020 was drawing to what was for some a very welcome close. “That there is no time. It’s all NOW. Yesterday is a NOW and tomorrow is a NOW. Knowing the NOW is knowing how to navigate.”
During a year that many struggled to navigate, the Detroit-born, LA-based artist certainly had his compass out, plotting a bold course with New Reality Now, his latest label venture. Dropping metallic trap productions swaggering with sub, he produced for a succession of MCs B La B, Adam Killa, Bloody Jay, Rizzoo Rizzoo, OG Maco, Nia Kay and signed off the label’s first year with ‘Feng Shui For Minds’, a various artists comp that delved into neo-ambient, sitting somewhere between new age and club. All this music, however, was just paving the way for ‘Cheetah Bend’, Edgar’s first artist album since 2012’s ‘Majenta’, and a full-dive into his hybridised vision of modern hip-h