Fort Ancient Records is a Cincinnati collective consisting of producers Homage CVG, Waldo From Cincinnati, Phonopage, Dren AD, and Samuel Steezmore. Earlier this year, amongst their other projects, the collective started a beat tapes series called Fort Ancient Airlines, the idea being that each volume would be a short instrumental trip somewhere, with a pilot leading the way. After making stopes in Rochester, Long Beach, and Kansas City, the group takes one last trip this year, this time to Biloxi.

As the opening track, “Taxi on the Runway,” plays, the tape immediately takes you to the Mississippi Delta, with some slide guitar leading the way as the artist known as Joness hops on the mic with her Southern twang to set things in motion. From there, it’s a short commuter flight, with two downtempo instrumental tracks providing the inflight entertainment. The tracks are less bluesy and a bit more generic in their approach, but they are still enjoyable electronic/hip hop beats that you’ll be nodding your head to. Once the plane lands on track four, though, we get back into the Delta, and the energy begins to rise again, and Joness will once again grab your attention with her charm and charisma as she walks you through the landing. We get one more outro track, and then the very short project is over. Overall, it’s a little bit of a mixed bag, but their reinterpretation of the delta blues and the introduction of Joness are where the intrigue is.

Each entry into the series is short and sweet, but the collective is talented, and this project allows them to take some risks. Biloxi takes some chances, and some of them work better than others. Maybe they’ll explore some of these sounds on futures projects, maybe they won’t. The real question, though, is where they’ll take us in 2019.