The first in a projected series of works in the label’s Music To Draw To series, Satellite is a bit of a surprise swerve for Kid Koala, a.k.a. Eric San, who’s renowned for making experimental hip-hop that features clever samples of vocal recordings and found sounds, and a virtuosic use of the turntable to bring out its melodic capabilities. San’s fifth studio album is the first to not rely on samples. Instead, he’s created eleven exquisite ambient soundscapes that sometimes twinkle and float like snowflakes, and other times creep up ominously, to loom like thunderclouds. He’s interspersed them with seven ethereal, melancholic songs that tell a story about lovers separated by a one-way voyage to Mars. San played all the instruments on the album, which include synths and keyboards, strings, guitars, turntables, and noisemakers; and he enlisted Icelandic singer Emilíana Torrini to add her beautiful, wispy voice to the tunes. He wrote five of the songs, coming up with lyrics for the first time, and Torrini wrote the other two. They’re all slow and stately and devastatingly beautiful, gently evoking the vastness not just of space but of loss as well.
