Shamantis
"U Smile" 800% Slower

There's this kid, Justin Bieber. Who is he? Or what is he? I'm reading now. He's Canadian. Do you know how old he is? Sixteen. This guy is sixteen and has recorded three albums: My World, My World 2.0, and My World Acoustic. Bursting with creativity. I open the video of the song for a moment, and it immediately makes me lose the urge to laugh. But anyway. It’s not about him in the end. I mean, the song is his, but he comes later.

I was rummaging through ambient, idm, dumb step, and up pops this guy. Who. His name is Nick Pittsinger. Shamantis for art or whatever you want to call it. Well, he's 20 and lives in Florida. Wait, Florida, no, but how. Florida, yes. Turns out last summer he got totally fed up with the sixteen-year-old's single - or maybe to pay him tribute, who knows - he got totally fed up, as we were saying, and he opened a simple freeware program, such as Paulstretch, and you know what he did? He slowed it down. Slowed it down by 800 percent.

And what came out of it is this. Or rather, it's a part of it, because the review marks it as a single, but it’s not really a single, it would be an EP at this point, as it is 35 minutes long, this journey. The link has only part of it uploaded, but you can easily find it in full online. And how does it sound? Well, how does it sound. It’s a monolith. It sounds like Sigur Rós. How did the New York Times put it? It sounds like Sigur Rós doing Vangelis covers in a cathedral about to be swept away by ocean waves.

Ambient, Shoegaze, damn, yes, it fits. It fits, and it's unrecognizable. I'm tempted to know more now, whether there is provocation, challenge, or pure delight behind it. The fact is that you could really make music from and with anything, and especially transform it to make it, in this case, not only listenable but better. When experimentation aims at improvement, at least in this, there's nothing new; it's true. But what drives me crazy is creativity itself, maybe that's why most of the time I find covers more interesting than original pieces. And I say that Shamantis has convinced me, and that this "U Smile 800% Slower" is the most beautiful journey I've made lately.

This review wanted to start from nothing, to reach someone who certainly doesn’t seem like nothing. I find other works by him, I'll leave the link here because I bet more than one will enjoy the listening, this Shamantis plays the mystic, his music, it reads, could be described as if Enya or the Boards of Canada got lost in the depths of the Amazon. It's up to you now to go find them.