Art Owens sometimes strays too far into “smooth jazz” for my tastes but that isn’t always a bad thing. Smooth jazz, if it does not irritate you, makes for good sonic wallpaper, something in the background while you’re concentrating on other things.
Well, Space Rhythm walks the borderline of smooth jazz, but doesn’t go over it in a way that irritates me, but it’s also close enough that you can play it and ignore it, or play it and listen and not feel like your musical mind is turning to mush. (Yeah, I don’t like so-called smooth jazz, if you couldn’t tell.)
It’s also one of those albums that justifies its synth sound. He seems to have been going for a retro-futuristic lounge sound, and he hits it, making all the noticeable synth work for it, rather than against it.
Space Rhythm by Art Owens is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Doing Slapstick in the Kingdom of the Blind 