New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Sam Gendel's album DRM, released by Nonesuch digitally last October, is available on vinyl today. The follow-up to his March 2020 Nonesuch debut, Satin Doll, DRM features Gendel's solo musical experiments with vintage instruments such as a forty-year-old Electro Harmonix DRM32 drum machine, antique synthesizers, and a sixty-year-old nylon-string guitar - accompanied by his voice.
Gendel has had an extraordinarily busy year, beginning with the release of Satin Doll just as the world went into pandemic-related lockdown last spring. In late 2020 and early 2021, he was a guest on two other Nonesuch releases, Joachim Cooder's Over That Road I'm Bound and Sam Amidon's self-titled album; collaborated on an ad campaign for UJOH DANSKIN's spring/summer collection; created a twenty-minute-and-twenty-one-second re-interpretation of Vampire Weekend's song "2021;" released the fifty-two-track album
Fresh Bread; had a song, "BOA," prominently featured in the Netflix film Malcolm & Marie; performed across Pino Palladino and
Blake Mills' Notes with Attachments, as well as designing its artwork; and recorded Dilate Your
Heart in collaboration with Ross Gay, Bon Iver, and Mary Lattimore. Gendel also was recently featured as a guest on Mike D's podcast, The Echo Chamber.
He continues to receive critical praise as well, with Pitchfork Editor-in-Chief Ryan Schreiber Tweeting, "Sam Gendel is putting out the most fascinating ambient and loop-based music this year. He's pulling new age, jazz and vaporwave bits into richly expressive, hypnotic textures that are deeply soulful but also sound a little like piped-in mall music from the early 90s." And the Los Angeles Times called his two Nonesuch records "sublimely understated," adding, "Hazy and with beats that are just as often hinted at as conveyed, Satin Doll and ... DRM seem to wobble beneath some invisible weight."
Gendel says of DRM, "I'm imagining people listening to [it] and thinking, 'What the hell is this?', like they'd just encountered some sailing ship in the sky."
Gendel is best known as a world-class saxophonist - it's the instrument with which he's led most of his bands, as well as the instrument on which he's guested with the likes of Vampire Weekend, Ry Cooder, Moses Sumney,
Perfume Genius, Sam Amidon, and Louis Cole's Knower - but DRM is saxophone-free. "There was no active effort on my part not to include it; it just wasn't part of the equation when I started recording it," he says. "I just found a formula, working around this DRM32 drum machine, and rolled with it. I don't consider myself just a saxophonist, I'm just someone who works in music." DRM was recorded in one sixteen-hour session, and then manipulated by Gendel with electronic percussionist
Philippe Melanson. It was mixed by
Blake Mills, and mastered by Mike Bozzi.
Gendel's previous discography includes 2018's
Music for Saxofone & Bass Guitar with bassist Sam Wilkes and his "smoothly psychedelic debut" (Pitchfork), 2017's 4444.
