- Spaced-out R&B, broken beats, mutant jazz… you'll keep ticking off the genres listening to Simple's improvisational electronica. After releases on Ilian Tape and Produkt Schallplatten, as well as his own Two Circles, Konstantin Papatheodoropoulos unwraps six brief, often desolate, excursions—just 18 minutes between them—for R&S offshoot Apollo.
It may sound like damning with faint praise, but "Barely Together" sounds like it could have come from a chillout compilation a decade ago. It's sweet, stoned jazz, with lumbering beats and ghostly whispers. "Main Street" adopts the same pace, taking a Rhodes piano and shoving it through a bunch of effects; "Lather" is positively frantic in comparison, part demented clog dance, part swooning hymn. "Draw the Shades," "Felt and Cognac" and "You Used To Run It All" draw slightly too heavily on other producers—Burial (in the case of the former two) and J-Dilla—even if Simple has done it subconsciously. That said, the latter is a slo-mo hip-hop concoction that's undeniably pretty.
Tracklist01. Barely Together
02. Main Street
03. Lather
04. Draw the Shades
05. Felt and Cognac
06. You Used to Run It All