Archetype - Joe Armon-Jones (2023)
A moody 2-step garage banger to remind you that Ezra Collective's keyboard player is also a fierce electronic music producer
I was lucky enough to see Ezra Collective play live three times in London across 2023.
Hammersmith Apollo in February introduced me to their celebratory stage show. Before then, I’d only ever heard through headphones.
Cross The Tracks festival at Brockwell Park in May let me dance shoulder-to-shoulder with my wife, our friends and thousands of others on trampled grass under the early summer sun.
And at the Royal Albert Hall in November — two months after they won the prestigious Mercury Prize for their sophomore album, Where I’m Meant To be — I watched them from high up in the stands as they shook the historic room into an irresistible euphoric frenzy.
Femi Koleoso on the drums is the band leader. Between sets he takes the microphone and speaks directly to his audience, championing the need for joy and escapism, modelling the spiritual leadership of a pastor. He and his brother TJ, who plays bass guitar, grew up in Tottenham, north London, where they learned to play their instruments at church as UK garage and grime raged around them in the 2000s.
Voiceless but equally present across the stage is Joe Armon-Jones on the keyboard. At all three shows I saw, at some point, he and Koleoso would break out into epic call-and-response duets. Alongside Charlie Stacey, who plays keyboard with drummer Yussef Dayes, he is the most impressive keys player I’ve seen live. His hands and fingers move across multiple boards as fast as lightning, so fast it seems as if he’s always experimenting with a different variation of Ezra Collective’s catalogue, freely honouring the improvisational nature of jazz, grime and other genres which collude to produce their unique breed of London sound.
Given Ezra’s bold collective talent, impressive catalogue and unmatchable performance style as a tight nit group, you would be forgiven for overlooking the fact that Armon-Jones is an artist in his own right. He has a long track record of producing deep, thoughtful electronic and instrumental music, and has collaborated with others to create bodies of work that I still return to all the time: from 2017’s Idiom with Maxwell Owin to A Way Back with dubstep legend Mala and Tinted Shades with vocalist Fatima, both from 2022.
Since it dropped last year, the lead single and title track off his Archetype EP has stayed in my rotation. I am a sucker for 2-step drums, its nighttime sound effects and vocals haunt your ears like an old Burial joint, and the punishing bass has made the song one of my go-to selections whenever I want to test out the capability my new AirPod Maxes.
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