MALAKAI’s musical acumen has been at the forefront of his career from the jump; eschewing sound design and genre trends at every turn, he has instead carved out a warm, cinematic territory amongst his chilled-out contemporaries. His meticulous, emotionally charged tracks soar across stereo space, channeling experiential dives into sonic dreamscapes born in the center of MALAKAI’s creative domain. As each release sees the light of day, the fog of war rolls back on the next footsteps in the MALAKAI story, accessing ever more novel boundaries of music production and arrangement. In partnership with the venerable Colony Productions, he’s finally cracked the seal on 2020’s first suite of MALAKAI machinations: Axiome.

Axiome’s offerings are quintessentially in line with the constant variable across MALAKAI’s discography'; a musical styling that places notation at the helm of the ship, steering compositions through glitchy astroid belts and featherweight musical nebulas. While the territory’s charm remains familiar, Axiome explores a more rugged terrain than previous MALAKAI EP’s, with a grit, width, and movement that builds on the robust characteristics of his music. The egress into that terrain is “Apollo”, an ode to the transient god of music, knowledge, and the sun. Stuttered arpeggios roll across a bed of sub weight, cushioning the melody and filling out the sparser corners of the spectrum. It’s a serenade amongst reverberant tones and mothballed frequencies that round together to form a smooth, contiguous musical torus. The heft in “Apollo” is counterbalanced by the EP’s amicable farewell, “Solace"“; a gentle cascade of legato bends and slides meet harmonious, supple chord phrasing for a novel, starlit dance through synthesis. It’s the characteristic MALAKAI thumbprint, complete with choice granular cuts and a careful serving of liquid low end, and it wraps up the EP with the same multi-hued aesthetic that turns the very first pages of Axiome.

MALAKAI’s catalog continues to simultaneously evolve its production standards while traversing each successive phase of the MALAKAI journey. It’s an even-paced waltz through stereophonic sound, translating an emotional output into a musical frame of reference. The transition from Odd Views to Axiome feels as biological as it is methodical, and while we’re soaking up the fruits of MALAKAI’s most recent labor, we can’t help but keep our eyes and ears aimed squarely at his future.

Axiome is currently available for purchase on Bandcamp, and will become available for stream and download from all other major platforms on the 17th of July. You can pre-save the release on Spotify here.

FOLLOW MALAKAI: Soundcloud / Spotify / Bandcamp / Website