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Music

Check Out Airbird's 'Inspirations' Mixtape

Splitting his time between Appalachia and NYC, Joel Ford's sound marries the metropolis and the mountains.

Joel Ford, one half of Ford and Lopatin (formerly Games), recently took on another guise. Airbird's Trust EP is a five-track release that was made with the desire to express a dialectical confrontation between the open spaces of the Appalachian mountains, where Joel resides on occasion, and his other home town of NYC. The man-made auras of the metropolis vie with the majesty of the natural world throughout. However, this dialog is played out in a gentler form than the description above implies, as the sounds augured by each place blend effortlessly into tracks that somehow swell and rise far above and beyond the synth notes and samples they are composed of. The near-ephemeral electronica of the EP moves from the clipped glitches to deeper arrangements that fuse to give the feeling of a continuous journey that seems to extend time.

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In keeping with this aural aesthetic, Ford crafted an exclusive mixtape just for Noisey readers:

Tracklist:

Henri Texier - "Amir"

Airbird - "Long Lake"

Caribou - "Sandy"

Camel - "Chord Change"

Thundercat - "For Love I Come"

Alan Holdsworth - "City Nights"

Jan Hammer - "The Great Boat Race"

Autechre - "qplay"

Herbie Hancock - "Nobu"

Fennesz - "Rivers of Sand"

Listen to a track from the Trust EP, out now on Software Label Recordings here:

And snag it [here](http:// http://www.softwarelabel.net/release/trust).

@suzeolbrich