Some musicians need just the right instruments to create. Colin Andrew Sheffield is not picky that way. If you happen to hand him the box of ignored CDs or LPs in your basement, he could probably make an album out of its contents. Samples taken from commercially available recordings are his raw material. He grabs the good bits and loops, stretches or otherwise processes them into components of new pieces of music that bear very little resemblance to the source material.
In fact, difference is exactly what he wanted to accomplish when he set out to make Serenade. It follows up Images, a 2023 release that used samples from jazz records to create a sequence of soundscapes that might flicker, churn or loom, but never swing. This time, the idea was to take material that could be used on a hip-hop album and come up with something else. Sheffield has certainly succeeded on that count. Beat-free and bereft of voices, the dozen tracks on Serenade feel more like memories of an art movie that moved you 30 years ago than amalgams of passages from funk, soul and library records.
There are occasions where you can tell that this music was made out of music, such as the scrap of a horn fanfare that surfaces during “Progression” and the title track’s mournful strings. But more often, the parts Sheffield uses are so small and so thoroughly processed that all that’s left are texture and feeling. That latter element is what makes Serenade alluring; every sound has emotion baked in. [Elevator Bath]
—Bill Meyer
