Noa Erni - The Mental Traveller (2021)

If music can take our mind to any imaginable place, on endless individual journeys, Noa Erni’s “The Mental Traveller” is the infinite soundtrack. A soundtrack for mental wandering and soul searching, a blend of rap, jazz and hip-hop beats. “The Mental Traveller”, an album assembled like a literary anthology, offers musical arrangements and unique narratives where epilogue and prologue of each track merge seamlessly. Far beyond the horizon of compiling single tracks, “The Mental Traveller” is a journey of sound and unity. Inspired by David Axelrod and William Blake, Ahmad Jamal and Flying Lotus – just to name a few – this work aims to be a tribute to these legends’ legacies of past, present and future, detached from trends, norms and classical narrative structure. Swiss-born producer and computer conductor Noa Erni has been crafting obscure jazz and hip-hop behind closed curtains (a.k.a. his flat in Berlin, Germany) for years – free from external pressure and as an adjunct to his day jobs as sommelier and co-owner of local fine wine store “Friedenauer Weinhandlung”. While the album sounds like it was played by a jazz outfit with years of stage experience, the truth surprises and is even more exciting: Noa crafted the songs in countless hours of experimenting with a midi keyboard, various instrument plugins and perfected reverb settings. It was not one and the same band but one and the same person. Just a few tracks include actual live instruments.