& Friends

Naarm-based composer, producer/engineer and bass player Henry Jenkins.

Jenkins is known to most as the producer/engineer behind Surprise Chef, Karate Boogaloo, and the Grammy-nominated Frollen Music Library. Serving as College Of Knowledge Records' in-house recording and mix engineer, Jenkins has provided the sonic constitution for Melbourne / Naarm's instrumental cinematic soul movement.

& Friends sees Jenkins turn his abilities to his own brilliant compositions. The album comprises 12 introspective instrumentals - deep, cinematic odysseys steeped in romance and sincerity, with an unmistakable 'freak funk bump'.

Jenkins explains the conceptualisation of & Friends: "I wanted to write a record I would look forward to recording with my friends. The music I was writing had a funk sensibility in the bass and drums, contrasted by a more cinematic approach in the harmonic and melodic content, with guitars slipping and sliding in between. I tried to make that contrast the character of the record. I felt that every song should have the same instrumentation and with the same personnel. This became an enjoyable creative constraint; how much variation could I pull out of the same 8 instruments over the course of the album? I wanted to find as much diversity as I could within these tight bounds."

Jenkins applied these principles to the recording of & Friends, bringing together longtime musical collaborators Hudson Whitlock, Darvid Thor and Callum Riley (Karate Boogaloo), Lachlan Stuckey and Jethro Curtin (Surprise Chef), Lewis Coleman and Lena Douglas (The Cactus Channel) to realise unconventional arrangements across three guitars, piano, string synthesizer, Hammond organ, drums and bass, with Jenkins himself assuming bass guitar and production duties.

The resulting album is a strikingly unique melange; moments of picturesque ambience move into head-nodding funk, with the three guitars and three keyboards precisely arranged across the stereo field throughout. The record displays the influences of film composer Bernard Herrmann, lounge pioneer Les Baxter and Motown's Lamont Dozier, alongside JNBO's own eccentric idiosyncrasies.

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