THE ALBUM LEAF Shares Remixes By Balmorhea, Bryan Senti, Dustin O’Halloran, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, and Boom Bip
February 16, 2024 BY Bailey Vigliaturo
Los Angeles-based electronic artist The Album Leaf completes a sequence of genre-expanding remixes with Balmorhea’s take on “Afterglow” from his 2023 album, Future Falling. Featuring vocalist Kimbra from the original track, the once downtempo electronic song becomes a neoclassical ambient endeavor mixing hushed instrumentation with cinematic layers. The Balmorhea remix completes a package of five remixes that includes previous released works by Bryan Senti, Dustin O’Halloran, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, and Boom Bip. The collection has already garnered over 300,000 streams. Future Falling was The Album Leaf’s first original body of work, not including his numerous notable film scores and re-issues, since his acclaimed 2016 album Between Waves and featured notable indie artists Kimbra and Bat For Lashes.
LISTEN NOW
https://thealbumleaf.ffm.to/afterglowremix_ftkimbra
Jimmy LaValle, the visionary behind The Album Leaf, is a prolific musician who has composed music for film and television, scoring over 20 projects, including award-winning films, Netflix shows, and commercials for companies like Nike and Google. Most recently, he collaborated with Michael A. Muller on the original score for the film Things Will Be Different, directed by Michael Felker, which will be premiering at the SXSW Festival next month. LaValle will be in Texas for the festival.
Stay tuned for more to come from The Album Leaf.
ABOUT FUTURE FALLING and THE ALBUM LEAF:
For the past seven years, the prolific Jimmy LaValle put his primary focus on the tight deadlines that came with scoring films and collaborations with apps like Calm , allowing the loose concept of the “next record” to stretch on with over two hundred demos written and dozens of album ideas before the ten final tracks that comprise, FUTURE FALLING, finally stood out to him. A fluid, cohesive, and definitive set, the record exhibits LaValle as emblematically inquisitive and renewed by outside perspectives.
A desire for innovation, and the necessity of the pandemic, forced many of the collaborations to be done remotely, making LaValle the arranger of layers from all over: drums, synths, horns, violins, voice, and more. Without the in-the-room dynamics, he had more time to experiment, adding and subtracting ad infinitum with LaValle’s signature Rhodes taking a back seat to the synths, effects pedals, and other analog-sourced electronics. With various machines, including the Novation Peak and Moog DFAM, as his engine, LaValle routes the sounds in and out, re-sampling and manipulating drums and tones to achieve the shapes his mind’s eye was seeing. “ There’s a lot more exploration, out of the box; I’ve found a really good balance in creating music organically and analog, utilizing digital tools to tweak the source further.” The result, mixed by Joshua Eustis (Telefon Tel Aviv), is a masterful exercise in pacing; the music meanders, pulses, and arcs in a way that arrests attention.
The Album Leaf has been steadily making his mark as a soft-spoken innovator since 1999. Now based in LA, Jimmy LaValle started out in the San Diego music scene creating vivid, rhythmic, soaring instrumentals centered around the Rhodes piano. With over two decades of acclaimed releases (for Sub Pop, City Slang, and others), countless film scores, and numerous collaborations with artists and brands, he has become a touchstone for the next generation’s wave of melodic and meditative electro-organic music.
