Over the course of the last twenty years, Los Angeles musician CUSCINO has made a career writing, composing, and producing music for both himself and for a wide range of films. He crafts sonic landscapes that owe as much to his influences — Segovia, Prince, Massive Attack — as they do to his own perception of the world around him. The balance that he is able to maintain throughout his music, that of electronic dancefloor rhythms married with ornate, often pseudo-orchestral melodies, sets his music apart from the casual EDM masses. There is a reverberating chromatic heart which lays at the center of his music and keeps it from slipping into some blandly homogenous electronic no man’s land. With the release of his debut EP, Eternality (out now on Fashion Sells Musiq), CUSCINO is looking to expand on his already sizable fanbase and show as many people as he can that EDM, and electronic music in general, is alive and in a constant state of flux.
Over the course of its six tracks, Eternalityblends wobbly synths, dramatic beats, and the occasional set of filtered vocals in an effort to breach the synthetic with the organic. There are leagues of artificial rhythms littered across these songs, but every once in a while, the sound of a honeyed voice breaks through and creates a delicate balance between all aspects of the music – the analog and the digital, the past and the future. And that’s due to the fact that, for all its electronic wizardry, this EP never forgets its ancestors. There are nods to proto-electronic bands like Kraftwerk and Faust – and even allusions to 80’s bands like Soft Cell and Ultravox — scattered about if you listen carefully. They may not be overt and may not even be intentional but they are there. And it creates a bridge between CUSCINO’s influences and his own inspiration. And it makes for a fascinating musical line of thought when considering how electronic music has expanded and developed over the past three decades and how CUSCINO is part of its continuing evolution.
Beats Per Minute is pleased to premiere the album stream of CUSCINO’s upcoming debut EP, Eternality.
