Essential Key “Sons of Freedom” cassette (Not Not Fun)

Sons of Freedom is the culmination of a decade-long fascination with idyllic new wave library music. After retiring his ethnographic tropical ambient project Coconut Dealers in 2012, Konstantin Shkolnikov found himself drawn to a different muse: Essential Key. Across a series of self-released digital collections, the vision streamlined and solidified into a palette of soft rock licks, fretless bass, and cheap 80’s drum machinery, in a sheen of velvet tape hiss.

Inspired equally by Japanese prog, Patrick Cowley, AOR obscurities, and “the joy of life,” the album’s 10 instrumentals flow with cohesive leisure, warm and wood-paneled, spiked with sleek funk. It’s music for cruising, surfing, and soaring, on wind or water, in fantasies past or memories not yet made.