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Hot Sugar Album Cover
Hot Sugar Album Cover

Listen To The Full Stream Of Hot Sugar's Beautiful Debut LP 'God's Hand'

Lenny Kravitz, Grace Jones, Lauryn Hill, Lion Babe, Thundercat, SZA & More Rock The Afropunk Festival 2015 in Brooklyn, NY.

Close your eyes and listen to God's Hand, the new debut LP from Hot Sugar, and you'll see colors bright and erratic, like a Nitebrite's pegs scrambled and repositioned by a host of hands. The LP made its online premiere today courtesy of The Tonight Show, and now the whole world is able to take a trip down its winding path. The NYC-based producer makes what he calls "associative music"--a heady version of electronic dance and ambient that's meant to alchemize meaningful emotion out what was once dead air space. Sugar (real name Nick Koenig) often sets out with recording equipment to capture electronic static, motorized creaks and the low hisses that cover modern constructed space, then amplifies that noise and turns it into new, bizarre instruments--sounds that are not at all out of this world but rather whispers of the ghosts inside all our machines.

Though conceptually intimidating, the actual product of all of Hot Sugar's work is in fact comforting--he most definitely operates in a grounded musical mindset, and his collaborations with The Roots and contribution to Broad City are proof enough that his inventions can play well with others. And so connected by heartbeat drums and Koenig's hushed melodic vocals, God's Hand is album fundamentally devoted to its soothing grooves, building, coasting, and decaying at a pace familiar to anyone schooled in modern electronic music. Opener "Trauma" slowly unfolds as a series of clicks and glimmers, and later, "Athena" weaves out-of-whack synth patches and pitch-altered vocals into a relaxed groove that takes its cues from Flying Lotus.

It's hard to tell exactly which flickers, clicks and echoes on God's Hand come from Koenig's field recordings--a difficulty that just goes to show that his odd technique is worth the effort. His associative collections sublimate into songs that prove both weird and fun. Hot Sugar's debut record is a lushly surprising piece of electronic music, fed off the sonic crumbs that our world has decided it doesn't need.