Yugen - Calgary

We wanted to share this track earlier, but felt like it would fit best as a Mellow Monday post and held off until today. Abbey Fontaine and Edwin O'Hara are long term friends and a duo out of Melbourne working under the project name Yugen. After both having had to pull through some tough personal battles, they were faced with the choice of whether or not to continue with their musical project. As you can tell since you're reading this here, they decided to continue and put everything into their music.  This approach definitely comes across in their first track. Yugen sent some of their material my way through freshdrops email, and I'm glad they did - Calgary blew me away with the emotional depth and vocal chops exhibited on it. The backing track is a fairly simple but driving beat, but the real strength of this piece comes from the ambience created in the background along with the slow evolving melodic elements all working in unison with Abbey's superb vocal work and lyricism. Best of all, Calgary is released as a free download from their Soundcloud, which can even be downloaded from the embedded player below.

Yugen has already had some attention from Triple J, and have also put together a short teaser video available on Vimeo. Calgary is the first piece of work from Yugen, but it has me just waiting on their next piece. Make sure to follow their pages and watch for this duo as more material becomes available.

- KJ