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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.
“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