Odd Nosdam is a producer from Berkeley, and one of the founding members of anticon.. He’s been carving out his own unique space as a solo artist for about twenty years now. His last album, Like When You Ain’t, came out just last September. He now returns with a new album based on found sounds, Mirrors.

Mirrors is an interesting album in a few different ways. For one, Odd Nosdam is one of the most distinct producers of his generation, creating this unique style that combined ambient electronic music with a dusty vinyl hip hop aesthetic that was always recognizable the minute you heard it. So when it comes to Mirrors, even though Odd Nosdam picks a different method to the album by working found sounds mostly sourced by private press vinyl, it still sounds like an Odd Nosdam album the minute you put it on. That said, when you get deeper in the weeds with the album, there is some really fascinating aspects to the way Odd Nosdam composed the music. When it comes to the overall shape of the album, Odd Nosdam named the album Mirrors because he was composing it specifically for vinyl, making sure that the two sides of the album would reflect each other and be in musical conversation. So on one hand, you can listen to this album casually and enjoy it on the base level of being a chill psychedelic downtempo album, but you can also really pull up a chair, dig in, and really enjoy all the tasty little morsels Odd Nosdam has included, from some really bizarre individual sounds that are pieced together to form some beautiful beats, to longer compositions such as “Mirrors II,” which slowly builds and builds over the course of about ten minutes, never sounding repetitive or complacent. It’s on a track like this that you really get to appreciate Nosdam not just as a producer, but as a writer/arranger who really understands how to make an instrumental composition with a point of view and a story to tell.

Odd Nosdam has been at this for a minute, and Mirrors is another excellent addition to his catalogue. It’s unique and challenging, with layers of musical information to dig through, but it’s also really easy to enjoy and chill out to. That sounds a lot easier to do than it is.