mister water wet: bought the farm

Following a golden first streak of releases by uon, Exael, and Pendant in 2018, Huerco S' West Mineral Ltd. returns to mine a rich seam of ambient jazz sampledelia by Mister Water Wet; a Puerto Rican artist with a gift for conveying in-between, gently altered states of mind and the logic of the natural world. Revealing Mister Water Wet's music for the first time beyond his circle of friends, Bought The Farm yields an elementally cool and breezy spirit guided by a first thought/best thought intuition through 55 minutes of crackly, hand-built music riddled with ephemeral soul. In terms of texture and structure, it's a sound maybe best compared with Jan Jelinek at his most frayed and sloppy, or even a pastoral inversion of Kelman Duran's rugged chop 'n' paste arrangements, essentially rendering a distinctive style that hovers between heavy-lidded, Afro-Latinate jazz, sampled indigenous instrumentation, and strains of gently bucolic, ambient introspection. Although based in the USA, Mister Water Wet spends a lot of time with his pops in Puerto Rico, and the subtropical natural world and revolutionary politics of the Caribbean islands osmotically informs Bought The Farm. In ten parts ranging from zoned-out drifts to pockets of sweetly psychedelic delirium, Mister Water Wet uses a patented blend of sampled artefacts and dusty magic to literally and metaphysically connote his conception of a spiritual home, framing a portal from where he can "speak" to Pedro Albizu Campos, a leading figure of the Puerto Rican independence movement, while immersing listeners in his lushly verdant, oasis-like bosques, or naturally sprawling woodlands and iridescent rivulets of sound. Ultimately Bought The Farm is a beautifully modest and intimate expression of self, heard through the prism of the lands and spirits that shaped it. From the aeolian bleeps of "Walking West" to the flutes snagged in the breeze of "Gaduduman Trades," atavistic traces of the natural world and ancient traditions lead into moments of heart-rending dreaminess in the humble centerpiece of burnished drums and dream pop diva called "Dart," before flowing out into oceanic new age with "Cuevas," whereas highlights such as "Drought" feel like Kelman Duran cooking a wood-fired interlude for Boards of Canada, and the heat curdled jazz-fusion of "Gills" gives way to a memorably sublime parting statement in "Sarah Sleeping."