Josué Kinter is a Phoenix, Arizona-based singer and songwriter who crafts abstract music with a meditative approach and dreamy yet dark ballads. He just dropped his debut studio album “Nightblooming” which he has been working on for the past 2 years. The album was produced by the artist himself with Josh Medina who also did the engineering and mixing and mastered by Brandon Weil of Fuzzwallz Mastering.
The first time I came across this album, I wasn’t sure what to expect; I started listening randomly and some of the songs were meditative, while others gave a post-punk vibe. After listening closer I was amazed but how abstract yet harmonious it all was. The artist used a huge variety of instruments combining abstract sounds and mainstream ones with a wonderful orchestration and placement for each of them in every song. a significant number of instruments used for meditative sounds are placed which perfectly interprets the theme of the album which emphasizes the beauty of the shortness of time, “meditation on the brevity of beauty and the beauty of brevity” as the artist describes it.
I found “Sun Song” is the perfect interpretation of the combination of both sounds, the meditative and the post-punk. Some of the songs were borderline instrumental like ‘The Bad Sleep Well’ and ‘Moonlight’ that had very short vocal lines. It caught my attention how he used instruments like santur, pan flute, gong, and kalimba with guitar, piano, trombone, and bass.
The 10-track album came to life with the collaboration with so many talented artists and musicians that helped portray perfectly Kinter’s vision as most of these songs were written shortly after the artist woke from his dreams. He was joined by bandmate Matt Oliverio on drumset and percussion, Chris Del Favero on synth, bass, Nord drum, whistles, and erhu, and Sonny Declaro on bass. Further joined by Elizabeth Kennedy Bayer on flute, Hannah Blair Akins as additional vocals, Alan Acosta on sax, Saul Milan on trombone, and Lars Rynning on contrabass clarinet, kalimba, and soundscapes on one of the tracks.
