Orbital Ensemble is the new group from the thriving Toronto jazz fusion scene, bringing an immersive fusion of psychedelic grooves and jazz melodies influenced by MPB (Música Popular Brasileira)
Inspired by road trips playing 70s MPB and Afro-Brazilian drumming – the psychedelic jazz debut, Orbital is the debut album from Orbital Ensemble
The project is headed up by multi-instrumentalist Felipe Sena, a Brazilian-Canadian whose upbringing across the two countries has inspired this meeting of jazz and psychedelia, rooted in Brazilian rhythms on Orbital, a debut album inspired by space, artistic resilience and cymatics (the visualisation of sound).
Orbital traverses a rich landscape of harmonies centred upon the warmth of psychedelic hazes. Locked in deep grooves, these build out from gentler sounds caressed by beautiful motifs into spiralling improvisations, with sister tracks paired up across the record. The eclecticism hints at elements of Brazilian artists Azymuth, Arthur Verocai and Meta Metá combined with the sounds of psych groups Dungen, Khruangbin and King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard.
The debut album comes after international radio play on Gilles Peterson’s BBC Radio 6 Music show and Worldwide FM for their first release, the Live Session EP, as well as the first forays into translating Orbital Ensemble into a live experience with shows in Toronto produced by Afro-Brazilian and Latin music programmers Uma Nota Culture.
Sena multi-track recorded much of the album’s ideas himself at The Root Down Studio before inviting flautist and saxophonist Lazar Miric and percussionist Mauricio Takara to collaborate on the album. But Orbital has its roots as a concept connected to the planets, atomic structures, the gravitational pull of the moon and the vibrations of sound. With the latter, Sena’s own study of music through cymatics has been a constant source of inspiration for this.
Orbital draws on all this imagery through the depth of harmonic layers across the album. The first single Daydreams is a mini-epic. The percussive feel of the guitar starts before reverberating with the low notes of the whirring saxophone. The flute’s airiness beautifully floats above the rhythm, a mellowness interrupted by the change in pace to where the saxophone explodes with punchy improvisation around the new motif.