Washed Out Downbeat | Electronica | Leftfield 3 Items

Initial LP pressing on Yellowy Green Vinyl. The music of Washed Out has always levitated over a timeless frontier. You can sense it in his immersive, amorphous vocals, the expansive soundscapes, the wistful storytelling. It's a sweet spot where, says its creative force, Ernest Greene, "any sort of association or memory from the past can transport you instantly. I love that." Greene's transcendent output has earned him the moniker of "Godfather of Chillwave" by Pitchfork and a co-sign from Portlandia, which borrowed his track, "Feel It All Around," for its utopian theme song. His latest, Notes From a Quiet Life arrives after delivering more than a decade of distinct and disparate creative re-imaginations at a remarkably high level (five albums, two EPs). Notes is bold in its intuitiveness: Greene has left the treadmill of music-as-a-business, instead letting his artistic interests lead the way. "Each album," says Green, who also paints and sculpts, "is a world-building exercise." The Georgia native left Atlanta in 2021 to move back to the countryside he knew growing up. Where escapism once flooded his thoughts, today he is preoccupied with the universe of wonder in the reality around him. He named the former horse farm he moved to "Endymion" (after the pastoral John Keats poem about a lovesick shepherd - its opening line: "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever"), and it has shaped all that he's created there, from his music to his albums' creative direction to his planned large scale visual-art experiments. "I've read that every five, maybe 10, years, you're practically a different person - like literally, on a cellular level," Greene explains. "The things that you're going through will end up changing you, and you're kind of a different person. This album is a reflection of that. Experimenting with painting and sculpture helps my music. They influence each other. That was a kind of realization for me. I don't want to look back on my life one day, and be like, 'Oh, it was all about maximizing productivity,'" he says. "I want to enjoy this." That purity of vision is what makes Notes From a Quiet Life so potent. It's the first album Greene wholly self-produced, with some mixing assistance from Nathan Boddy (James Blake, Mura Masa) and David Wrench (Caribou, Florence + the Machine). "Early in my career, I had a lack of technical skill, and there were some things I wasn't 100% enthusiastic about," he says, noting Jean-Michel Basquiat's distinct, self-driven method as an inspiration. "Something that I was looking for was...I didn't want any illusion of anyone else's influences. I wanted to see this through to the end. And honestly, that was a big challenge. Illustrating that, Greene's list of influences for Notes From a Quiet Life are mostly sculpture icons: minimalist legend Donald Judd, abstract expressionist Cy Twombly, and modernists Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. Of the latter, he observes, "The majority of his working life was spent on his country estate, and he wasn't living a cosmopolitan lifestyle. He was focused on just making good work, you know?" Notes from a Quiet Life is Washed Out's fifth album.

Washed Out is Atlanta-based producer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Ernest Greene. Over three enchanting, critically-lauded albums and an EP, his music has proved both transportive and visual, each release inviting listeners into immersive, self-contained universes. With Purple Noon, his fourth album, and his return to Sub Pop, he delivers the most accessible Washed Out creation to date. Life of Leisure, Washed Out's 2009 debut EP, set the bar for the Chillwave era, shimmering in a warm haze of off-the-cuff Polaroids and pre-IG filters. Within and Without, his 2011 full-length debut on Sub Pop, morphed into nocturnal, icy synth-pop and embraced provocative imagery. 2013's Paracosm was Greene's take on psychedelia, with a full live band and kaleidoscopic light show, and saw him playing to the largest audiences of his career. The sample-heavy Mister Mellow (2017, Stone's Throw) delivered a 360 audio/visual experience, with cut-n-paste and hand-drawn animation to match the hip-hop influences throughout the album. With each release, Greene has approached his evolving project with meticulous detail and a steadfast vision. For Purple Noon, Greene again wrote, recorded, and produced the entirety of the album, with mixing handled by frequent collaborator Ben H. Allen (Paracosm, Within and Without). Production of the album followed a brief stint of writing for other artists (most notably Sudan Archives) which enabled Greene to explore genres like R&B and modern pop. These brighter, more robust sounds made their way into the songs of Purple Noon and mark a new chapter for Greene as a producer and songwriter. The vocals are front and center, tempos are slower, beats bolder, and there's a more comprehensive depth of dynamics. One can hear the luxuriousness of Sade, the sonic bombast of Phil Collins, and the lush atmosphere of the great Balearic beat classics. Mediterranean coastlines inspired Purple Noon, and Greene pays tribute to the region's distinct island culture - all rugged elegance and old-world charm - and uses it as a backdrop to tell stories of passion, love, and loss (Purple Noon's title comes from the 1960 film directed by Rene Clement and based on the novel The Talented Mister Ripley by Patricia Highsmith). Much like romantic Hollywood epics, the melodrama throughout is strong: a serendipitous first meeting in "Too Late"; a passionate love affair in "Paralyzed"; disintegration of a relationship in "Time to Walk Away"; a reunion with a lost love in "Game of Chance." Purple Noon adds a layer of emotional intensity to the escapism of Washed Out's oeuvre, taking the music to dazzling new heights.

Mister Mellow moves further away from the synthesizer-heavy sounds of the recent Washed Out releases and more band-driven sound of his work on iconic labels Sub Pop in America, and Domino in Europe. On Mister Mellow, Greene draws from the experimental collage techniques of musique concrète and plunderphonics artists such as The Residents. Combining styles as diverse as free jazz, house, hip-hop and psych together with interlude-esque voiceover samples, often pulled from anonymous YouTube vlogs, he creates a busy, chaotic, and caricaturish mix that mirrors the claustrophobic, hyper-stimulated psyche so familiar to young adults.

As he continues to carve out his innovative sonic identity, influenced by the world around him but unafraid to buck trends, it’s fitting that Greene has partnered with legendary hip hop label Stones Throw Records, long a home for beat-loving musical rebels. His approach to releasing music is every bit as individual, too: in an environment where compiling singles into an album format or working with a single video director are the norm, Greene has chosen to commission eleven different artists to bring the visual aspect of his fully-realised album project to life.

On Mister Mellow, Washed Out steers clear of emotion to empathise with the minutiae of the world around him. “I’ve been much less interested in sentimentality and emotion for the past couple of years,” says Greene, “In some ways, I think its a reaction against getting older and having more responsibilities. Maybe I’m just nostalgic for a time in my life where I could just relax and block out the world for a moment.” Though Mister Mellow is an intensely personal album, its ideas and observations speak to the lived experience of so many young adults, an experience that we come to see as both funny and sad.