Mas Ysa is back with more powerful music in his new Untitled EP. Gaining notoriety with his 2015 album Seraph, Mas Ysa is a one man show out of Montreal who has a strange ability to make the flute sound incredible, backed by a powerful EDM beat; he’s got a booming, emotive voice that is built for this type of avant-garde electronic music. His music is sort of a Bon Iver/Animal Collective mixture that’s some parts folk and many parts experimental electronic. Untitled is an expansion of these strange but awesome sounding mash of genres and, more broadly, his artistic approach to music. The EP is accompanied by a beautiful short film that has a crazy amount of people in it including Lena Dunham.
Interestingly enough, he leaves out the flutes and saxophones in this release for more straight forward arrangements in which his voice and lyrics take center stage with an undeniable range. In “Hold Out,” his voice turns quivering and low as he asks, “Who you gonna hold out for?” and in “Appeal to the Panic” his voice moves to be more loud and exclamatory over a fast paced beat Compared to his previous works, listeners will find “Face” to be a very familiar song, utilizing a similar progression to one of my favorite songs of his, “Margarita.”
Many of his previous albums tended to feel more drawn out, like he was trying to fill in the leftover space on an album. With this EP, listeners will encounter the right amount of Mas Ysa and will be able to further experience how artistic and expressive he is through the companion short film. I’m hoping that this is the format he’ll use for all his future releases because it just works so damn well.