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‘Collaboration lifts up the field, electrifying it’: musician Carlos Niño on jams with André 3000 and more
The multi-hyphenate LA artist explains how he facilitates journeys into the ‘eternal depths’ – and why his new album is all about pregnancy and birth
He speaks in unhurried, spiralling paragraphs as if untangling a knot, pulling overlapping ideas free from one another, and his music – a graceful, glowing combination of glimmering ambient, dreamy hip-hop beats and experimental jazz – unspools in the same way. Though you’ll find his name listed in the credits of a vast array of projects, his primary focus for the past decade-plus is Carlos Niño & Friends, a collective with a rotating cast of players that includes Surya Botofasina, Nate Mercereau, Laraaji, Sam Gendel and the late New Age great Iasos. All of that is beautiful to me.” Niño exudes that uncynical astral perspective that feels so endemic to California; he considers his friends and collaborators family, a connection that doesn’t necessarily connote blood, but “time, or most importantly, spirit”.
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