A simple tenet guides Brandon Miguel Valdivia’s music as Mas Aya: “The more personal you can make music, the more interesting it is.” He does just that on his fifth album, Coming and Going. On “Be,” the Nicaraguan Canadian percussionist and producer passes the mic to his young daughter, Martina, and Valdivia’s partner and co-parent, Lido Pimienta, appears throughout the album—as she did on 2021’s Máscaras—softening Mas Aya’s twitchy, organically textured beatscapes to the point that they feel like the fruit of a family jam session.
Spending an afternoon with Valdivia and Pimienta sounds like it must be enchanting, considering the duo’s vast range of experiences, credits, and collaborations—from remixing Run the Jewels to starring on a children’s television show with Beverly Glenn-Copeland. Keeping busy throughout pandemic purgatory, Valdivia and Pimienta not only became parents, but moved from cosmopolitan Toronto to the comparatively suburban London, Ontario. Coming and Going was initially composed around field recordings that Valdivia collected at his parents’ house, drawing upon Buddhist spiritual practices to create a sense of tranquility within the frantic beats, like Arthur Russell after listening to Traxman.
Coming and Going boasts a patient, panoramic sound that embraces a lifetime of disparate cultures, communities, and influences. Valdivia welcomes house music’s pulse under spiritual jazz’s sprawling tent; the album gathers together a village of guest players, such as Afro-Cuban percussionist Reimundo Sosa, trumpeter Nicole Rampersaud, and Josh Cole on bowed bass. “Dora” and “Windless, Waveless,” the album’s bouncy opening songs, flash back to folktronica-era Four Tet and Caribou. “Ocarina” is anything but a reference to The Legend of Zelda, wrapping Rob Clutton’s luminous electric bass in rustling percussion and Rampersaud’s bright streaks of horn. Pumping pianos reminiscent of Mas Aya’s labelmate Scott Hardware echo throughout “What Shattering!” and the astonishing “No Trace,” an oasis of jazzy ambient bliss with vocals from fellow Toronto musician Isla Craig.
By the time he reaches closer “Abre Camino,” Valdivia has stretched all the way out, filling nearly seven minutes with shimmering synths, wooden flutes, and rhythms piled upon rhythms. Miraculously, these kinds of densely crisscrossed threads soothe instead of stress, drifting deeper into the ambient dimensions of Mas Aya’s music. On Máscaras, his music’s spiritual dimension masked political subtexts that were revealed in samples of street protests and revolutionary poets. This time, the personal is political. Alongside the warmly tactile sounds of the album’s innumerable interwoven instruments, the loving presence of the two primary people in Valdivia’s life, and an even larger chosen family of close collaborators, creates a human connection so strong you can feel it. One way of pushing back against injustice, he suggests, is simply existing in the here and now with your loved ones—an action so potent it needs no words to resonate.
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